A VA who holds the conversation when a seller pushes back makes the whole difference on expired listing calls

That's a real result. A 67% appointment rate on cold expired follow-up is well above what most people report, and two signed listings in ten days from six contacts is the kind of outcome that justifies the whole model.

The thing you landed on matters: the difference between a VA who holds the conversation and one who falls apart when a seller pushes back is almost never about the script. The script just starts the call. What carries it is how the VA was trained to handle objections, which are the moments when a seller says something like "my agent was useless" or "I'm done with all this." A VA who can stay calm, acknowledge what the seller said, and redirect without reading a canned line is doing a genuinely skilled task. That skill comes partly from selection and partly from deliberate objection training, not from giving someone a script and hoping for the best.

The note-taking instruction you added, writing down exactly what the seller said about why they thought it didn't sell, is worth keeping. That information tells you how to price the listing conversation before you walk in the door, and it's easy to lose if the VA is just marking calls as done.

One thing worth verifying as you add more VAs: the training process that produced this person. If you can document what you gave her and how you onboarded her, you can reproduce it. If you can't, you're dependent on finding the same fit by luck the next time.

The strategy guide's section on recruitment and training covers this in more detail under the Guide tab if you want a framework.

What did your onboarding for this VA actually look like, time and materials wise?

The expired niche in 92078 is genuinely underworked right now so the timing helped, but attributing two signed listings to the VA deserves some pushback. She booked the appointments and you closed them. Those are two different skills and conflating them makes it hard to know what you actually need to replicate next time. The tighter feedback loop is one where she logs how far into the script she got before the seller pushed back, alongside what the seller said, because that is where the real pattern shows up.

The two who wanted to wait until spring, did you keep them in a drip or just let them sit. I lost a signed commission on a similar situation in Scottsdale, 2021, because I assumed "spring" meant they'd call me back. They listed with someone else in March.

The thing about 92078 specifically is that sellers who sat through summer with an overpriced list are going to feel the calendar pressure differently than someone in a market where inventory stays tight year-round. San Marcos has enough seasonal psychology that "wait until spring" can be a real plan or just a stall, and you probably will not know which until February. The script discipline piece is the one to keep watching because that is where the whole system either holds or does not, and most people cannot tell in the hiring stage whether a VA will stay composed when a seller starts deflecting. Four out of six on cold expired outreach is not a small number, whatever the final close rate turns out to be. It would be worth knowing whether she is doing any of this async or if it is live dials only, because the difference in conversion usually shows up in how fast she can loop back when a seller says call me Thursday.

What is her hourly rate, and where did you find her?