The Open House Strategy, Builder Negotiation Secrets, and Relationship Rules That Drive Debora McCarty's Real Estate Business

There is a version of real estate that looks effortless from the outside: the agent who always seems to have a listing, who clients refer without being asked, who closes the deal that everyone else thought was dead. Debora McCarty, broker associate at Watson Realty in Jacksonville, Florida, is that agent. What is less visible is the systematic thinking, deliberate preparation, and genuine human investment that makes the effortless version possible.

In a candid conversation on the Real Estate Excellence Podcast, Debora pulled back the curtain on three of the most important pillars of her practice: open house strategy, new construction negotiation, and the relationship-building philosophy that has produced clients who refer their families, their friends, and sometimes their friends' mothers.

Rethinking the Open House

Ask most real estate agents what they think of open houses, and you will get a shrug. The conventional wisdom — that open houses rarely produce the actual buyer — has persuaded many agents to treat them as a perfunctory checkbox rather than a genuine business tool. Debora disagrees, and she has thought carefully about why.

“I love open houses,” she said without qualification. “I know a lot of realtors don't, but I believe in the act of doing real estate. You go out, you go to an open house, and you talk to people. You're going to get better at talking to people because you are doing it.”

Her preparation for a Saturday open house begins on Monday. The first element is branding: her open house signs feature her face, not just her brokerage logo, because she has made a deliberate choice to make herself the recognizable constant in the transaction.

“Your face is you sell you. You are the agent. You sell yourself,” she explained. “So all my open house signs have my face. They contact me directly, because I want those leads.”

Her current innovation is a “coming soon” open house sign — placed in front of the property at the beginning of the week, announcing Saturday's event to everyone who drives or walks by for five full days before the doors open.

“That open house sign is on the property all week long,” Debora noted. “This is a great way to show the neighbors that you are doing your best to sell the house, and you are telling everybody that the house is going to be open, come see it.”

The neighbor outreach is intentional and systematic. Debora sends mailers to surrounding properties, because she understands something that less experienced agents miss: the most motivated buyers for any given neighborhood often already live nearby. They have friends who have been wanting to move in. They have parents looking to be closer. They have siblings who admire the community from the outside.

“Maybe they have family, they have friends who want to move into the neighborhood,” she said. “So I want them to come see the house. I always invite the neighbors.”

The listing gets posted to MLS and promoted on Facebook, including as a public event — a simple tactic that generates organic engagement and surfaces buyers who might not otherwise have been actively searching. When Debora cannot attend in person, she coordinates with other agents in her Watson Realty office to ensure coverage, because leaving a listing unhosted is not an option she considers.

The deeper purpose of the open house, she argues, goes beyond the transaction itself. It is a demonstration of commitment — proof to the seller that their agent is physically present, actively engaging the public, and doing the work.

“You were there showing to your seller that you are working for them, and you are putting in the time,” Debora said. “You are the representative of the seller. You are there to sell that house to those potential buyers that are coming in.”

The Pricing Conversation: Honesty, Strategy, and a Two-Week Agreement

One of the most delicate moments in any listing relationship is the pricing conversation — particularly when a seller's expectations exceed what the market will support. Debora has developed a structured approach that preserves the relationship while protecting the client from the damage of an overpriced listing.

Her starting point is always data: comparable sales, active competing listings, and a frank assessment of how the subject property stacks up against what buyers can choose instead. She has been known to take sellers to see competing homes in person, so that the comparison is visceral rather than theoretical.

“We need to go see how your house compares to that house, so you understand why you cannot ask more,” she said. “Or you can ask more. It's all part of that presentation that you want to make sure that they go in fully aware of what's going on.”

When a seller insists on a price above her recommendation, Debora does not capitulate silently or fight the client into submission. She proposes a structured trial.

“Let's have an agreement. We try it for two weeks. If we don't get an offer, or if we don't get a lot of showing requests, then you know that you have to lower the price,” she said. “A lot of times they agree on that.”

She also holds space for the possibility that she is wrong. The market occasionally produces buyers who value specific features in ways that comparable sales do not capture, and she has seen homes sell for six figures more than she estimated they would.

“I have seen houses being sold a hundred thousand dollars more than I thought the house was worth,” she acknowledged. “There is a buyer for every house out there. There is a buyer who is looking for your house with the features that your house has, and that buyer may be willing to pay more.”

New Construction: What Buyers Lose When They Walk In Alone

New construction represents approximately 30 percent of Debora's business — a meaningful share, and one she approaches with the same preparation and advocacy she brings to the resale market. Her starting point is education, and she delivers it before her clients set foot in a builder's sales office.

“This is what happens when you go without me,” she tells buyers candidly. “As long as you have my card when you go in, just give my card, tell them you're with me.”

The builder landscape has changed significantly since the pandemic era, when many builders refused to honor buyer's agent compensation for clients who wandered in unrepresented and then returned with an agent later. Today, Debora says, builders have recognized the value of working with agents and generally honor representation agreements — but buyers who enter unrepresented still leave money and concessions on the table.

“The builder has the builder's interest,” she explained. “If you don't have guidance, if you don't have a realtor with you, you don't get it.”

The site agent is not an adversary, but they are not a neutral party either. They will not volunteer unfavorable information that a buyer does not know to ask for. They will not flag that a particular upgrade package is overpriced relative to what a third-party contractor would charge. They will not proactively negotiate on behalf of a buyer who has no representation.

“Just because you didn't ask,” Debora said simply, summarizing what buyers without agents miss.

She is equally firm on the misconception that going without an agent earns a discount. Builders maintain pricing discipline to protect the integrity of the community's comps — dropping the price for an unrepresented buyer would undermine every other home they are trying to sell at full value.

“The builder has a duty to that community to keep those prices stable,” Debora noted. “It is not in their best interest. They want to keep prices stabilized in that community.”

Listening as a Negotiation Skill

Some of Debora's most instructive stories involve deals that seemed impossible — and became possible because she was paying attention to what her clients actually said, rather than filtering their words through transactional assumptions.

She described a seller who had been on the market for months, exhausted by the process of clearing out her three dogs for every showing. The seller was not, at her core, unwilling to move. She was unwilling to continue performing the ritual of evacuation for strangers who might not even make an offer.

“I said: okay, so the solution for this problem is not to put your house on the market again. I have to go find a buyer for you, so you don't have to go through that process,” Debora recalled.

That insight — that the problem was not the price or the condition but the showing experience — led her to match that seller with a buyer who wanted land and found in the property exactly what they had been looking for. Both parties got what they needed. Neither would have found the other without an agent listening closely enough to connect the dots.

“When you are talking to your client, you have to listen. You have to listen about what they need, what they want,” Debora said. “Sometimes we miss a lot of what they are saying because we want to rush that conversation. You want to get to the point, you want to get to the transaction. But you have to stop. You have to listen.”

The Relationship That Returns, and Returns Again

The cumulative effect of Debora's approach — the note cards, the vendor referrals, the open house follow-ups, the listening, the willingness to pressure-wash a client's driveway or drive back from Atlanta to sit through a three-hour listing appointment in Spanish — is a business that sustains itself through trust rather than advertising.

A client she had nurtured for over a year, whose mother ultimately decided not to sell, recently called to refer a friend who was ready to list. The referral became a listing appointment. The listing appointment, after three hours of conversation, became a signed contract.

“They signed the contract with me because they felt that I could be that one person to help them,” Debora said.

She attributes that outcome not to any single technique, but to the cumulative weight of showing up consistently over time — being the agent who stayed in touch when there was no immediate transaction in sight, who solved problems that were not strictly in her job description, and who treated every interaction as an investment in a relationship that might not pay dividends for months or years.

“It is not transactional. It is not just about me building my business and making money. I want to help my client. And there are so many people out there who don't have a direct path to selling a home.” — Debora McCarty

For buyers, sellers, and fellow agents in Jacksonville and St. Johns County, the takeaway from Debora's approach is both simple and demanding: do the preparation, show up in person, listen more than you talk, and invest in people as if the transaction were only the beginning of the relationship — because in the best cases, it is.