But there is one exception… For example, I have clients who settled on their house recently that did not want to make it public that they bought a house nor where it was located (for a variety of reasons). I do not include their names nor the street address of that property in the list of transactions I’ve done in the last 12 months.

I like that it generated the good conversation though. It’s always interesting to hear opinions of practitioners outside of my area. Maine is an interesting market to work in, I am in a very pretty rural area half way between NH and Portland.

We have a thriving seasonal waterfront & second home market but locals are pretty economically depressed. We have A LOT of old school agents that are stuck on old ways of doing things. When I was doing my stats in my appointments I was told I was wasting my time and when customers REALLY didn’t care I chose to focus on other things. SO that I where I am coming from. In areas that have more competition I am sure any advantage is worth taking!

I think statistics may also favor the specialist— so, if you’ve done a fair number of short sales or 1031 exchanges or historic homes or whatever your specialty and I need that specialty, you’re my man (or woman)if you can show me the numbers.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst…

To Joe, I say that I used to do the statistics not only for myself as an agent but for the agency I worked for and Mike is correct. Even using those basic criteria the numbers can still be manipulated…this I know from experience and I only used data from our MLS. No matter how honest your intent others may not have the same interest in being so straight forward and I can tell you from experience that it could cost you deals. I lost more than one appointment because someone else came with their stats, which conflicted with mine…the sellers attitudes was that one of us were lying and in each case both sellers dumped the agents with the stats.

For Jay, If you’re going to use statistics in your presentations maybe think about sticking to personal ones. What is YOUR LP/SP ratio, Your Properties Ave. Days on Market, YOUR AVG. Buyer per transaction Savings in Dollars and set them against how the average agent in your agrea performs. Turn YOUR PERSONAL successes directly into customer benefits and you’ll never walk away with egg on your face:-) Also You don’t need to do statistics to show your cutomer satisfaction surveys. When I was a listing agent I always included excerpts from them in my prelisting packages and I always kept them in my presentation binder. It has been my experience that People DO pay attention to THAT!

But what if I specialize say, in short sales? In short sales, you can probably toss list-to-sold price ratios out the window, and dates almost become meaningless too.

You can “adjust” the metric to reflect a certain specialty, but what if I tend to work in a more general area, that covers a range of homes typically selling from $250K to $800K? Homes at the low range will have different sales stats characteristics than homes in the higher end of the range.

We send out “customer satisfaction surveys” to all our clients, whether they purchase or sell a home or not. It asks them to rate our services on a scale of 1 - 10 for things like communication, responsiveness, knowledge, etc. It’s in our listing presentation, but we spend almost no time covering it, and rarely get questions about it.