Sermon on Mount Lessons & My Business
On Sunday morning, Erin and I sat in a room of 3rd-5th graders with a whiteboard marker in my hand, trying to explain why Jesus said not to worry about clothes and things we all love.
We got through it. Salt and light. Don't hide the lamp. Build on rock, not sand. Treat people the way you want to be treated. If you want to see the whole thing in plain English, you can read Matthew 5–7 in the New Living Translation in about fifteen minutes.
Now Monday will come. A price reduction conversation nobody wanted to have. An inspection response that read like a lawsuit. An agent on the other side who had already decided I was the problem. And I'll find out, again, whether I actually believed the thing I had just taught to eight-year-olds.
Key Takeaways
Worry never added an hour to anybody's life, but it will make you a worse professional. It pushes agents into overpricing listings and talking buyers into the wrong house (Matthew 6:25–34).
A slow market is the rain in the parable. It doesn't create weak foundations; it reveals them (Matthew 7:24–27).
Almost nothing in a hard negotiation is about the number on the table. There is usually a death, a divorce, a diagnosis, or a job loss sitting underneath it.
Inspections kill deals because both sides stop being people to each other. One question fixes most of it: if I owned this house, what would I actually think is fair?
The kingdom Jesus described runs opposite to how business normally gets done. After 25-plus years, I think it's also the more durable way to run a business. That durability is a side effect, not the reason.
Table of Contents
Slow seasons and the worry that makes you worse at your job
Teaching this passage on Sunday is easy. Living it on Monday, when a listing has sat 60 days, is the harder part.
Jesus told people to look at the birds and the wildflowers and asked whether worrying had ever added a single hour to anybody's life (Matthew 6:25–34). I taught that to kids who have never once worried about a mortgage.
Then I drove home thinking about a house that has been on the market longer than the seller expected. In our area, depending on price band, median days on market have run anywhere from the mid-20s in a fast stretch to 60-plus in a slower one. National figures from NAR have hovered in a similar range. Averages don't help much when it's your house.
Here's the part people outside this business miss. There is no salary. No guaranteed next check. The bills do not slow down when the market does, and every agent I know has had a stretch where the math got quiet and scary.
Worry doesn't buy you a single hour. But it does buy you bad decisions. Worried agents take the listing at a price they know is wrong because they need the sign in the yard. Worried agents talk a buyer into a house that doesn't fit because the buyer has been looking for five months and everybody's tired.
Worried buyers do it too. They stretch past what's comfortable because they're afraid of missing out. That's why I'd rather someone run real numbers through an affordability calculator before they fall in love with a floor plan, and read through the home buying process here in Wilmington while their head is still clear.
💡 Pro Tip: If you catch yourself making a pricing or offer decision because of how it makes you feel today rather than what the data says, stop and wait 24 hours. Nearly every deal I regret was decided inside a bad mood.
Rock or sand, and why hot markets hide everything
The parable at the end of the sermon is about two builders (Matthew 7:24–27). The same storm hits both houses. The rain didn't cause the collapse. It just showed what was underneath.
Anybody looks like a genius in a hot market. When homes were going under contract in a weekend across Wilmington area communities, from Wilmington neighborhoods like Ogden and Porters Neck out to Leland, an agent could do almost nothing right and still close business.
A slow market is the rain. It asks whether you built anything. Defensible pricing you can show a seller line by line. Communication that keeps going when the news is bad. A database of people who actually trust you. A process you run the same way every time.
It works the same way on a listing. A house with a hard layout, deferred maintenance, or a price built on hope will still sell fast when inventory is scarce. Put that same house in a slower stretch, and the market says out loud what it was politely ignoring before.
That's why I keep pushing sellers toward preparation instead of optimism. Repairs done ahead of the inspection. Pricing set against real closed comparables from Wilmington area MLS listings, not against the neighbor's asking price. Boring stuff. Boring stuff is the rock.
💡 Insider Tip: Compare your home to what actually closed in the last 90 days, not what's still sitting active. Active listings are opinions. Closed sales are facts, and if you see homes expiring or sitting on the market for over 90 days - that is the hard truth and the market YELLING AT YOU.
What's actually in the room
This is the part I have needed the most, and the part I'm worst at. Jesus talked about the speck in someone else's eye and the log in your own, and he was blunt about the order of operations (Matthew 7:1–5, and again in Luke 6).
Here is what 25-plus years has taught me. What shows up in a negotiation is almost never about the number on the table.
Behind the seller who will not move $3,000, there is often a marriage coming apart. Or a parent who died and this was their house, and the furniture is still where they left it. Or a job that ended with no warning. Or a diagnosis nobody has mentioned out loud yet. Or three adult children who cannot agree on anything.
The speck and the log. Easy to draw on a whiteboard, harder to remember when an email lands the wrong way.
Sometimes it's simpler and heavier than any of that. Somebody is 78 years old and knows this is probably the last house they will ever own. Somebody is moving to a city they did not choose. Somebody is just plain grieving the loss of a place where their family was happy for twenty years.
A home sale is one of the largest financial events of a person's life, and it almost always lands on top of something else. So when a client seems self-focused, or a demand seems unreasonable, that's usually pressure from somewhere else getting pointed at the only thing in the pile that has a dollar figure attached to it.
The agent across the table has the same kind of life happening to them. Plus the same fear about their own next check. I forget that constantly.
Deal with your own log first. Not because the speck isn't real. It's often very real. But you cannot see well enough to help anybody while you're the most defensive person in the conversation. That's also why estate and trust sales need real representation at the table, which I wrote about in why seller representation at closing matters more than you think.
💡 Pro Tip: Before you respond to a message that made you mad, ask one question out loud: what might be going on that I don't know about? It takes four seconds, and it has saved me more transactions than any negotiation tactic I've ever learned.
The difficult client and the agent on the other side
Love your enemies. Do good and lend without expecting anything back. If you only love people who love you, you haven't done anything unusual (Luke 6:27–36).
In practice, that means being the same professional to the hard client that I am to the easy one. Returning the call from the agent who has been unpleasant for three weeks. Sending the document I'm not obligated to send. Not scoring the point I could easily score.
Nobody hands out awards for that. There's no line on a production report for it. And it does not always come back around, which is exactly the point being made in that passage. If it always came back, it would just be a strategy.
What I can tell you is that reputation in a market this size compounds. Wilmington and Brunswick County are not anonymous places. I have been in this business here since 1998, and I run into the same agents, lenders, inspectors, and attorneys over and over. How you behaved in a hard deal three years ago walks into the room with you.
The reviews I care about most are usually the ones from transactions that were not smooth. Tanya's story about selling her condo, which I shared in Tanya B.'s 5-star experience at 1521 Honey, came out of steady communication more than any clever move.
Inspections and the only question that matters
More contracts die during the inspection period than at any other point. In my experience, the reason is almost never the crawlspace. It's that both sides stopped being people to each other.
The seller reads the repair request and hears "your house is bad and you're a liar." The buyer reads the response and hears "you're being difficult, and you don't deserve this house." Neither of those things was said. Both of them get believed.
The Golden Rule is one sentence long (Matthew 7:12), and it settles inspection negotiations faster than anything else I've tried. The question isn't what could I get. The question is: if I owned this house, what would I honestly think is fair?
Older homes near the river and closer to the coast come with age-related items. Newer builds have their own list. If you're comparing resale to a new construction home in the Wilmington area, understand that a builder walkthrough and a resale inspection are two different conversations with two different sets of expectations.
Same goes for coastal property. Salt air, older roofs, and elevation questions come up regularly on beach homes for sale around Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach, and Kure Beach. None of that is a scandal. It's just the cost of living where the water is.
💡 Insider Tip: Sellers, get your own pre-listing inspection. A $500 report ahead of time removes the surprise, and surprise is what turns a $1,200 repair into a $6,000 credit request.
Waiting, and the deals that die anyway
Ask, seek, knock. Keep at it, because a good father gives good gifts (Matthew 7:7–11). That passage sounds simple until you're the one waiting.
This business is mostly waiting. Waiting on the offer. Waiting on the appraisal. Waiting on the lender's conditions, the repair estimate, the decision somebody keeps postponing until next Tuesday, then the Tuesday after that.
Keep asking, keep knocking. Some doors open late and a few never open at all.
And sometimes you wait through every bit of it, and the deal dies anyway. Financing falls apart eleven days from closing. The buyer walks for a reason nobody explains. I'm not going to tie a bow on that, because it hurts, and it hurts the client more than it hurts me.
What I will say is that hindsight has changed my mind about a lot of dead deals. The closing that fell through frequently wasn't the real outcome. The buyer who came back six weeks later paid more. The house that didn't work out was followed by one that fit better. I can't promise that. I've just watched it happen enough times to stop panicking on day one.
Practically, waiting well means staying in motion. Keep the listing marketed. Keep showing. Buyers, keep a saved search running in your property tracker account so the next option finds you instead of the other way around.
Where the treasure is, the heart follows
Don't stockpile treasure where moths, rust, and thieves can get at it. Wherever your treasure is, that's where your heart will be (Matthew 6:19–21). For anybody paid on commission, that verse has teeth.
The check is the loudest thing in the room. It is loud when a listing appointment could be a big number. It is loud when a buyer is one signature from ending a long search. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What you chase tells the truth about what you value, and clients can feel which one is driving the car. People know when they're being served, and they know when they're being closed. They usually know it before they can explain it.
The practical version of storing treasure somewhere else is giving away information that doesn't immediately pay you. Explaining tax implications before someone lists, like in this look at how a change to the capital gains exclusion could affect homeowners. Warning buyers about paperwork traps, like I did in what Zillow and Realtor.com aren't telling you.
Some of that advice costs me business. A seller decides to wait two years. A buyer decides to keep renting. That's fine. That's the job.
Salt and light in a business nobody trusts
Gallup's long-running honesty and ethics survey has historically parked real estate agents near the bottom of the professions list, down in the neighborhood of car salespeople and members of Congress. I don't enjoy that, but I understand it.
Most people walk into a real estate conversation braced for a pitch. Which means ordinary integrity stands out far more than it should. Telling a seller their price is wrong when they clearly don't want to hear it. Telling a buyer to walk away. Turning down a listing that isn't a fit for what I do.
Jesus said you don't light a lamp and then hide it under a basket, and that people should see your good works (Matthew 5:13–16). He also didn't say to stand next to the lamp pointing at it. That distinction matters in a marketing-heavy business.
Salt is a useful picture too. Nobody eats salt by itself. It just makes everything else taste like what it already was. Doing this work well mostly looks like being useful in the background, not being impressive out front.
If you want the unglamorous version of that, it's in our Wilmington NC real estate blog, our real estate news updates, and years of archived monthly posts. Market notes, community write-ups, and honest numbers. Not a highlight reel.
The whole thing runs backward
When Jesus finished the sermon, the crowd was amazed, because he taught with authority instead of quoting other teachers (Matthew 7:28–29). He also said he came to fulfill the law, not throw it out (Matthew 5:17). None of it was softer than the rules people already knew. It was harder.
Business says leverage the pressure. He says give without expecting return. Business says protect the commission. He says look at your own eye first. Business says win the negotiation. He says treat the other side the way you'd want to be treated. Almost every line of it runs opposite to the standard playbook.
And here is the honest observation after more than 25 years of selling houses here, watching the market move through the coast and the growth out toward Leland and Belville and the corridors reshaped by remote work, which I covered in how remote work is reshaping suburban growth: the backward way turns out to be more durable. Repeat clients. Referrals. Agents who pick up the phone when they see my name.
But that isn't the reason to do it. If durability were the reason, it would be a tactic, and tactics get dropped the moment they stop paying. You do it because it's right. The durability is a side effect you notice later.
I fail at this weekly. I got short with somebody last week over an email that probably wasn't meant the way I read it. Which is why I keep teaching it to kids. You can't hand a fifth grader a lesson you're not currently trying to live.
If you're thinking about selling and you want a straight answer about what your home will actually bring, including whether now is even the right time, I'm glad to have that conversation with no pressure attached. You can start with a real look at your options at Sell Your Home & Keep The Most $, or just search all homes and see what's out there. Either way, I'd rather tell you the truth than get the listing.
Tags: faith in business, Sermon on the Mount business lessons, Wilmington real estate, listing agent, home inspection negotiation
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