Why You Are Hearing This Objection More Than You Used To
This objection is not a fluke of one saturated zip code, it tracks a real, measured market shift. Investor-sellers, owners selling investment property as opposed to their own home, made up 10.8% of all home sellers in 2024, the highest share in the data’s recorded history, up from 10.1% the year before, while investors represented 13.0% of all home purchases that same year. The gap between investor buying and investor selling activity is narrowing, which means more investor-side participants, and more competing wholesaler and investor outreach, are hitting the exact same seller pool than in prior years. A seller telling you they are already talking to someone else is a plausible, increasingly common reality, not a stall tactic to dismiss.
The Mistake Most Callers Make the Instant They Hear It
The reflexive response to this objection is to either argue, insisting your offer is better without knowing what the other one actually is, or to fold immediately and end the call. Both throw away the same opportunity: this objection is a discovery-stage signal, not a hard no, according to standard sales-training guidance on how to treat it. A seller who is still willing to say this out loud, rather than simply hanging up, is telling you they haven’t fully committed yet.
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Book a Real Estate Fit CallThe Discovery Questions That Actually Surface a Real Gap
The recommended approach starts with acknowledging and empathizing rather than pivoting straight to a counter-pitch, then asking specific follow-up questions that surface what the seller actually values in an offer, whether that is speed of close, the price itself, certainty the deal will actually happen, or simply not having to deal with repairs before selling. That answer is different for every seller, and asking for it directly beats guessing at it.
Differentiating on the Thing the Seller Actually Said They Cared About
Once the seller names what matters most, the differentiation argument writes itself, and it targets a real gap instead of re-pitching the same generic value proposition the competing wholesaler already used. A seller who says certainty matters most hears about your actual closing track record, not a speed claim they’ve already heard once. A seller focused on repairs hears specifics about what "as-is" actually covers on your end, not a repeated promise every wholesaler makes. The goal is not to out-pitch the other conversation, it is to answer the one thing this particular seller said they still needed answered.
Why the Differentiation Has to Be Specific to What This Seller Said
A caller running a fixed script cannot ask a real discovery question and actually listen to the answer in the same breath, the two require different modes: one is reciting, the other is adapting in real time to whatever the seller just told you matters most.
That adaptive layer is exactly what VA Horizon’s Human + AI SDR team is trained to run: callers who ask the discovery question, hear the actual answer, and differentiate against it specifically, so a seller already fielding other calls gets a conversation that sounds like it was built for them, not a script read at them.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Realtor.com research, "Investor Selling Reaches a Record High as Market Dynamics Shift," via PR Newswire
- DealMachine, "Top 10 Seller Objections in Real Estate Wholesaling"