I have a simple rule before I take any high dollar conversation seriously, and I picked it up watching other investors work. If a seller will not get on the phone, they are not ready yet.
Text and email have their place. They are fine for scheduling a showing or sending over a document. What they are not good for is closing something that actually matters, especially when real money is involved.
Here is why. A phone call, or better, a conversation in person, tells you things a text thread never will. Tone. Hesitation. How someone answers a question they were not expecting. Whether they actually understand their own situation or are just repeating a number somebody told them to ask for. None of that survives being typed out.
I have watched an investor apply this exact filter on a house listed at 1.4 million dollars, for sale by owner. The seller wanted to handle everything over text and email. The investor pushed back immediately. Nobody is paying a million dollars for a house through a text thread. If we are going to do business, we need to talk, and I need to see the property.
That is not aggression. It is a filter. Serious sellers get on the phone because they actually want to sell. Sellers who avoid the call are usually one of two things: not serious yet, or aware there is a conversation coming that they are not ready to have.
Either way, you want to know that before you spend weeks chasing a deal that was never going to close.
The second half of this filter is just as useful, and it works on listings instead of people.
When a house has been sitting online for months with no offers, most investors assume something is wrong with the property. Sometimes that is true. More often, the property is fine and the listing is the problem.
There are three things that stall a listing, and it is almost always one of them, frequently all three at once.
The price is too high. This is the obvious one, and it is where most people stop looking. But price alone rarely explains a listing that will not move at all.
The pictures are bad. At a million dollar price point, a listing with phone photos instead of professional ones is telling buyers something before they even read the description. If the seller will not invest in how the property is presented, buyers assume the seller has not invested in the property either, whether or not that is true.
The description is weak. A vague, generic description on an expensive property reads as low effort, and buyers price in low effort. They assume there is nothing distinctive worth pointing out, even when there is.
I want to be clear about what this diagnosis is for. It is not about criticizing the seller. It is about understanding exactly why a deal has not happened yet, because that tells you what kind of conversation to have with them.
If the price is the issue, you are having a numbers conversation. If the photos and description are the issue, you might be looking at a seller who genuinely does not know how to market the property, which can be an opening, not a problem. A seller who has been quietly frustrated for months by a listing that will not move is often more receptive to a real conversation than one who just put the house on the market yesterday.
This is where the phone call and the listing diagnosis work together. You call because text will not tell you what is actually going on with the seller. You read the listing because it tells you what has already gone wrong with the process. Put those two things together before you ever make an offer, and you walk into the conversation already understanding more about the situation than most people who reach out will bother to learn.
None of this is complicated. It does not require special access or a paid tool. It requires being willing to make the call instead of hiding behind a screen, and being willing to actually look at a stale listing instead of scrolling past it.
The investors who consistently find deals other people miss are rarely doing something exotic. They are doing the basic things, consistently, that most people skip because a phone call feels like more effort than a text.
Next time you find a listing that has been sitting too long, do not skip past it. Diagnose it. Then pick up the phone. You will learn more in five minutes of conversation than you would in a week of back and forth texts, and you will know almost immediately whether there is a real deal there or not.
Kito J. Johnson is the founder of The HEIRS™ Movement (www.theheirsfamily.com), a community of people growing together through faith, real estate, entrepreneurship, and generational wealth building. He is the best-selling author of Real Estate Wealth: Remove The Guesswork From Investing And Create A Six-Figure Strategy and travels nationwide empowering audiences through education in real estate investing, financial literacy, and ownership. Kito is widely recognized for blending kingdom principles with practical strategies that help individuals and families build wealth, stewardship, and lasting legacy through real estate and entrepreneurship. Learn more at www.kitojjohnson.com