Brian Loebker’s average listing sells in 43.5 days. The Sarasota County average is 73.5. His average sale-to-list ratio runs 95%. His average sold price sits at $2.3M, against a $648K county average. Thirteen years, solo agent, $200M+ in career volume.
Numbers like that invite an obvious question: what’s actually producing the gap?
The honest answer isn’t marketing spend, or luck, or even the properties themselves. It’s timing. Specifically, how early a seller picks up the phone.
“The difference between those two outcomes is not effort.
It’s timing.” -Brian Loebker
The call that changes everything
Most sellers wait to call an agent until they’re close to ready, worried about wasting time or feeling locked in before they’ve made up their mind. That hesitation is understandable. It’s also expensive.
A seller who calls two to three weeks before wanting to be live gets a listing. A well-prepared one, but a listing. A seller who calls two to three months out gets something different: a launch, built with enough runway to actually use the tools that move a sale price.
The single most consistent advantage that early runway unlocks is guerrilla marketing.
What guerrilla marketing actually means
No sign. No public listing. No days-on-market clock running yet. Instead, a curated introduction of the property to a specific audience, agents with qualified buyers already looking in that price range and neighborhood, private digital campaigns built around the home’s story, controlled previews that surface real feedback before a public launch. It’s a soft opening, the same logic a serious restaurant uses before its grand opening, applied to a home.
It creates something a public listing can’t: scarcity before scarcity is manufactured. Buyers who weren’t in a rush start feeling urgency, because something they want is about to become available, and they know other buyers already know about it. That translates directly into stronger offers and cleaner negotiations.
None of it is available to a seller who calls two weeks before launch. Building the assets alone, photography, video, marketing collateral, agent outreach materials, takes most of a month before guerrilla marketing can even begin.
What to actually do before you call
Read the full Pre-Listing Game Plan for the complete framework, including the preparation checklist and guerrilla marketing details covered here. A few things worth doing now, whether that first conversation is 60 days out or 6 months out:
- Walk your home the way a buyer would: slowly, critically, without the attachment of having lived there. Note anything that reads as deferred, dated, or out of place.
- Hold off on paint colors, staging decisions, or starting any renovation. The improvements that move the needle at the luxury level are specific, and the ones that don’t are surprisingly easy to spend money on.
- Work backward from your real target close date, factoring in showing season, travel, and life in general. A home needs to stay in active-showing condition for the full listing period.
- Start the agent conversation earlier than feels necessary. That conversation is genuinely more useful with no pressure attached to it.
The takeaway
The gap between a 43.5-day sale and a 73.5-day one isn’t about working harder once the home is listed. It’s decided in the months before the sign goes up, in whether there was enough time to prepare properly and enough runway to build real demand before the public ever saw the listing.
If your own timeline is 60, 90, or even 180 days out, that’s not too early to start the conversation. It’s exactly the right time.
Curious what this looks like for your specific home and timeline? Start a confidential conversation with Brian.
Source: Stellar MLS and TrendGraphix Independent Reporting, 2023 through Q1 2026.