The Real Reason You and Your Realtor Didn't Click

How personality mismatch — not incompetence — is the hidden force behind most failed real estate relationships.

One day like any other, I was running an in-home sales appointment in Palm Springs when my client spent the better part of our time together venting about a horrible experience they'd had with a well-known and mostly loved local realtor. I actually know this realtor personally. Found it interesting that they had this experience, but knowing both personalities, it didn't surprise me. Not because this realtor had a bad attitude or was a bad person. I could just see that this client needed a softer touch and this realtor excels in structured processes. Neither of those things is a flaw. Together though, they just didn't mesh.

Over the past decade working alongside home buyers, sellers, and real estate agents across the valley, I've had a front row seat to both the wins and the woes of the transaction. And while there are plenty of things that frustrate both sides that are just unavoidable realities of the process, more times than not the real issue is communication — or more specifically, a mismatch in personalities. Not that the realtor was a terrible person or the client was living in la la land. It's that though it may have seemed that way to each of them, they simply didn't know how to handle each other.

I've been in in-home sales for over ten years — working with first time buyers, longtime homeowners, real estate investors, and the agents who represent them all. What I've found is that clients aren't unreasonable and realtors aren't dismissive — they just operate differently. When those differences aren't accounted for upfront, information stops flowing naturally between them. The relationship stalls. And everything downstream suffers for it.

The Biggest Complaint Nobody Talks About

That misalignment creates real problems during a real estate transaction — and for most people, buying or selling a home is the single largest financial transaction of their life. Both the agent and the client are depending on this relationship for something deeply personal: their security. Their next chapter. When that relationship is off, it doesn't just make the transaction harder. It creates stress that bleeds into every other area of life — and it could have been avoided from the start.

What's striking is that poor communication consistently ranks as the number one consumer complaint about real estate agents. But in my experience it's rarely that the agent communicates badly — it's that they communicate differently than the client needs. That distinction matters because it means the problem isn't fixable by finding a "better" agent. It's fixable by finding the right agent.

Why Referrals Aren't Enough

Until now, people have chosen their real estate agent through referrals, Google searches, and Zillow reviews. And look — we've all been on the internet long enough to know you have to take that with a grain of salt. A five star review from one person doesn't mean you're going to have that same experience. Go read the reviews of your favorite restaurant and you'll find someone who thought it was the absolute worst — wrong food, wrong vibe, wrong everything. It doesn't mean the restaurant is bad. It means experiences are personal.

And yet according to NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 43% of buyers still find their agent through a friend, neighbor, or relative. That trust is understandable. But a referral is your friend saying "I trust this person" — not "this person is wired like you." Those are two very different things.

What makes it more interesting is that most people never even shop around. The same report found that 67% of first time buyers and 76% of repeat buyers interviewed only one agent before committing. One. Which means most people are locking into a relationship — for the biggest financial decision of their life — without ever stopping to ask whether the fit is actually right.

Why put yourself in a situation where satisfaction on both sides is basically a coin flip?

What It Looks Like When It Works

At the end of the day, all any of us wants is to know that the person we're working with has our back. A realtor who will do right by the client. A client who trusts that their agent knows how to handle the situation. When that trust is there from the beginning, the whole experience changes. It flows. It's easy. It can even turn into a genuine friendship.

NAR's data backs this up — the number one thing buyers said they valued from their agent in 2025 was help finding the right home. But you can't fully deliver on that if the relationship itself is a mismatch from day one. The best agents in the world can't overcome a personality conflict that should have been caught before the first phone call.

How Agentry Was Born

It was in that appointment, listening to that client talk about a realtor I respect, that something clicked for me. I've spent twenty years in sales and every bit of training, every mentor, every hard lesson has been about one thing: building relationships. But nobody had applied that thinking to how people actually find their real estate agent. We match people for love on apps. We match people for friendship, for careers, for roommates. Why were we still throwing darts at a board of names when it came to something as serious as this?

That question became Agentry.

Like the big bang — swirling infinite particles of possibility — I saw this as a source of peace of mind for thousands, potentially millions of people navigating one of the biggest decisions of their lives. Over the next year and a half I spent every spare hour — late nights, weekends, early mornings — researching, building, and refining what this could be.

The result is a platform that matches home buyers and sellers with real estate agents based on personality and communication style — before anyone ever picks up the phone. No more guessing. No more referral roulette. Just the right person for you, from the start.

I built Agentry to lighten your mental load. To ease your nerves during a transaction so deeply tied to your financial and spiritual wellbeing. I hope it does all of that — and then some.

Take the quiz at agentryapp.com and find your match.

Written by Gary Moore, founder of Agentry.
Created by head, heart and fingers. Polished by AI.