Why We Roleplay Every Saturday (And You Should Too)

Allen Iverson once got asked about missing practice and famously went on a rant about it. We're talking about practice. Not a game. Practice. It became a punchline, but he was wrong about one thing: practice matters more than almost anything else you can do to get better at your job. That's true in basketball and it's true in real estate.

Every Saturday from 8:30 to 9:30 Eastern, a group of agents from different states and different brokerages hops on a Zoom call with me to run roleplay. Listen to this session on our podcast, Free Beer and Real Estate. We throw objections at each other, we run scripts, and we get better together. If you've never sat in on one, I want to walk you through what actually happens and why we do it the way we do.

A Perishable Skill

My teammate Mike Pillow, who covers the Mount Vernon and Apple Valley Lake area, compared it to shooting free throws. Every athlete knows the feeling of a skill going rusty the moment you stop practicing it. Sales conversations are the same way. You can know the theory, but if you're not saying the words out loud regularly, you hesitate at the moment it counts, which is usually the first ten seconds of a call with a real live lead on the other end.

That's the whole point of Saturday roleplay. We're not performing for an audience. We're getting reps in a room where it's safe to stumble, so that when we're on a real call, it feels like muscle memory instead of a script we're reading off a page.

What a Lead Follow-Up Call Actually Sounds Like

One scenario we run constantly is lead follow-up. An online lead requests to see a specific property, an agent calls to set the showing, and somewhere in that call the deal falls apart. In our practice session, the "lead" didn't even remember requesting the property. That happens constantly in real life. People click on a dozen listings in one sitting and forget which one triggered which call.

The agent handling the call worked through it by staying warm and specific, describing a detail about the house rather than getting defensive about being forgotten. Then came the objection almost every buyer's agent eventually hears: "Aren't you supposed to go through the listing agent?" The best answer to that isn't a canned rebuttal, it's a question back: who do you think the listing agent is actually representing, you or the seller? Once a buyer realizes the listing agent's job is to get the seller the best deal, not them, the value of having their own representation becomes obvious.

The Choice Close Beats the Calendar Dance

Somewhere in the middle of that same call, the agent set a showing appointment by offering two specific times instead of asking an open-ended "when works for you?" That's called a choice close, and it matters more than people think. An open question invites back and forth, what we call the calendar dance, where you throw out a time, they counter, you counter back, and momentum dies. A choice close moves things forward and, honestly, makes you sound busier and more in demand, which is exactly the impression you want to give.

The other detail worth stealing: set the appointment early in the call, before you start asking a string of questions. Nobody wants to feel like they have to pass a twenty question interview before they're allowed to see a house. Get the appointment locked first, then use the rest of the conversation to build rapport and gather information.

And once that appointment is set, follow it with both a text and a calendar invite. That combination is one of the simplest ways to boost show-up rates. People forget. A calendar invite on their phone is a small thing that prevents a real problem.

Separating Smoke Screens From Real Objections

The second scenario we ran was circle prospecting, calling around a listing or a sold property to find future business. The homeowner on the other end wasn't interested in selling today, full stop. But one line changed the entire conversation: "Are you in your forever home?"

That question, which I picked up from a fellow agent named Lee in New York, cuts straight past the polite "no thanks" and gets to whether there's a real timeline hiding underneath it. In our roleplay, it turned out the homeowner was two years from retirement and already planning a move out of state. That's not a lead you convert today, but it's absolutely a lead worth keeping warm.

Playing the Long Game

Not every call ends in an appointment, and that's fine. Some of the most valuable outcomes are permission to stay in touch: an email address, an understanding that you'll send an occasional neighborhood update, a note in your CRM to check back in as a known event approaches, like a retirement date. The goal isn't just converting today's calls. It's filling a pipeline that pays off two years from now because you stayed in touch and delivered value the whole time.

We also talked about a technique for gauging how ready a home actually is for the market: asking the owner to rate their own house on a scale of one to ten, with ten being new construction and one being a full rehab. It's a low pressure way to get someone talking honestly about their home's condition, and it naturally opens the door to offering a short list of improvements that would raise the value whenever they do decide to sell.

We Always Debrief

After every roleplay, we run through what we call good jobs and next times. What worked, and what could go deeper next time. In our circle prospecting call, the one thing we flagged afterward was not asking enough about the other person's background and career. Digging into that kind of detail does two things: it builds a real connection, and it often uncovers business you didn't know was there, past clients, referral sources, entire professional networks tied to that one conversation.

Come Practice With Us

If you're an agent and you want to sharpen your own scripts in a room full of people who will give you honest, useful feedback, join us. It doesn't matter what brokerage you're with or how many years you've been doing this. We meet every Saturday from 8:30 to 9:30 Eastern on Zoom, and every Tuesday we run a separate training session covering different topics for agents and business owners. Reach out to mike@21mike.com to get added to either one.

Mike Ferrante
The Mike Team at LPT Realty
www.21mike.com
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