What Baseball Umpires Can Teach Realtors About Professional Decision-Making
Your clients are not merely paying for access, paperwork, or rapid text messages. They are paying for professional judgment when the decision actually matters.
Credit Where It Belongs
This article was inspired by Harvard Business Review's November–December 2022 article, “What Umpires’ Calls Reveal About Our ‘Attention Budget.’”
That HBR article summarized research conducted by James E. Archsmith, Anthony Heyes, Matthew J. Neidell, and Bhaven N. Sampat and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research as The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field.
The original research examined how professional baseball umpires distribute limited attention while making repeated, time-sensitive decisions under pressure.
If you're wondering why a real estate education company is reading research about baseball umpires...
Fair question.
No, we have not abandoned real estate to begin teaching the proper strike zone.
We chose this research because professional umpires and professional real estate agents share an important responsibility:
Both must repeatedly evaluate incomplete information, make consequential decisions under pressure, and stand behind those decisions after everyone else has had the luxury of watching the replay.
Why iNVISIQ Looks Outside Real Estate
Some of the most useful ideas for real estate were not developed inside a brokerage conference room.
They come from behavioral science, professional sports, education, aviation, medicine, economics, leadership research, and other professions in which decision quality matters.
iNVISIQ finds those sources, evaluates what they actually support, and translates the useful principles into practical applications for real estate professionals.
That saves agents from spending Saturday night searching academic databases when they could be prospecting, serving clients, spending time with family, or doing almost anything more stimulating than reading a 38-page working paper about dynamic inattention.
What the Researchers Studied
The researchers evaluated approximately 3.2 million ball-and-strike calls made during 26,523 Major League Baseball games played from 2008 through 2018.
They used pitch-tracking information to determine whether each call was correct. They also evaluated how important each pitch was to the likely outcome of the game.
Baseball supplied an unusually useful research environment: professionals performing the same essential task repeatedly, with objective technology available to evaluate whether each decision was correct.
In real estate, we rarely receive that kind of immediate, high-precision feedback.
There is no electronic box hovering over a listing presentation announcing:
Perhaps there should be.
Harvard Business Review, “What Umpires’ Calls Reveal About Our ‘Attention Budget,’” November–December 2022.
National Bureau of Economic Research, The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field .
NBER Digest, “Among Umpires, Calls Improve When the Stakes Are High.”
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What the Umpires Revealed
The study did not suggest that professional umpires suddenly forgot the rules of baseball halfway through the game.
It suggested something far more relevant to every professional who makes repeated decisions:
Expertise does not provide an unlimited supply of attention.
Accuracy Improved When the Immediate Stakes Increased
Umpires appeared to devote more attention to pitches that were more likely to affect the outcome of the game.
When the decision mattered more, they concentrated harder and their probability of making the correct call increased.
Professionals recognize important moments.
That is the encouraging part.
Earlier High-Stakes Decisions Affected Later Accuracy
Greater attention devoted to earlier calls was associated with more errors later.
The researchers described this as evidence of a depletable attention budget.
Apparently the human brain did not receive the real estate memo explaining that it must remain fully charged until the final email, amendment, inspection question, and mildly panicked text message have all been handled.
Umpires Appeared to Conserve Attention for What Was Coming
When umpires anticipated more consequential decisions ahead, they appeared to devote less attention to the current call.
That suggests professional decision-makers do not merely react to the pressure in front of them. They may also allocate mental effort according to what they expect will happen next.
Short Breaks Appeared to Reset the Pattern
The effects did not continue across the entire game.
The short pauses between half innings appeared to interrupt the depletion pattern, suggesting that even brief breaks may help replenish attentional capacity.
Baseball apparently built cognitive recovery into the game.
Real estate built in a notification from the title company.
Now Welcome to the Average Realtor's Tuesday
The uniform changes. The responsibility does not.
A Realtor must process repeated requests, incomplete information, competing priorities, client emotions, legal obligations, market conditions, deadlines, and financial consequences—often while a phone behaves as though every vibration announces the imminent collapse of civilization.
Congratulations.
The most financially consequential question of the day has arrived after your brain has spent eight hours playing professional whack-a-mole.
The buyer does not care that this is decision number 147.
Nor should they.
They hired a professional because they need sound judgment when their money, risk, and future are involved.
Professional Learning Objective
Recognize that decision quality can be affected by the order, frequency, importance, and timing of earlier decisions—and begin organizing the workday around the protection of professional judgment rather than the worship of constant activity.
National Bureau of Economic Research, The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field .
NBER Digest, “Among Umpires, Calls Improve When the Stakes Are High.”
What Realtors Can Implement
Research becomes useful only when it changes behavior.
“Protect your attention” sounds intelligent enough to place on a motivational poster.
It is considerably less useful at 4:18 p.m. when two clients are arguing over a refrigerator, the lender wants another document, and someone has marked an email URGENT because apparently lowercase letters were unavailable.
Here is how to convert the research into professional practice.
Schedule High-Value Decisions During Your Best Thinking Hours
Identify the periods when you are typically most alert and protect them for work requiring judgment: pricing strategy, offer analysis, negotiation preparation, listing consultations, contract review, and difficult client conversations.
Do not automatically surrender your sharpest hour to routine email simply because the emails arrived first.
Take a Deliberate Reset Before Consequential Conversations
The umpire research found that the depletion pattern did not carry across the short breaks between half innings.
A reset does not require a spa reservation, woodland retreat, or two-week disappearance to a location with suspiciously excellent Wi-Fi.
Before an important negotiation or consultation, step away briefly. Stop answering messages. Walk, hydrate, review the facts, and enter the conversation with a mind that is not still wrestling with the previous seventeen issues.
Turn Repetitive Decisions Into Repeatable Systems
Save professional judgment for situations that require professional judgment.
Checklists, templates, intake forms, transaction workflows, buyer consultation frameworks, listing preparation procedures, and standard follow-up sequences reduce the number of minor decisions an agent must reconstruct from scratch.
A checklist does not make you less professional.
It prevents you from relying on memory after a day in which your memory has been asked to store showing instructions, gate codes, repair estimates, client birthdays, contract deadlines, and the location of the lockbox key someone definitely returned.
Create a Decision-Priority System
Not every request deserves the same amount of attention, the same response speed, or the same place in your day.
Separate decisions into three levels:
High consequence: pricing, contracts, negotiations, risk, deadlines, financing, and client recommendations.
Operational: scheduling, coordination, document collection, and routine transaction movement.
Low consequence: minor preferences, nonurgent messages, social notifications, and questions that can wait until the appropriate communication block.
Protect Important Work From Digital Interruption
Research led by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine has repeatedly documented the relationship among digital switching, fragmented attention, cognitive load, and stress.
Your phone does not distinguish between a client ready to write an offer and someone tagging you in a video of a goat riding a robotic vacuum.
It presents both with the same cheerful vibration.
Professional judgment requires you to make the distinction.
Prepare the Recommendation Before Entering the Pressure
Whenever possible, establish your decision criteria before the emotional conversation begins.
Review comparable sales, market exposure, financing terms, inspection findings, contract obligations, likely alternatives, client priorities, and acceptable risk before recommending action.
Preparation prevents the loudest voice, newest email, or most dramatic facial expression from becoming the unofficial managing broker of the decision.
How Better Decisions Can Lead to More Commissions
No study can promise that taking a ten-minute break will produce a commission.
That is not what the evidence says, and we will not dress an inference in a cheap suit and introduce it as a fact.
The reasonable business connection is this:
Better-prepared, less distracted agents may communicate more clearly, analyze risk more carefully, negotiate more deliberately, reduce avoidable errors, and provide a more professional client experience.
Those behaviors can strengthen trust, improve client retention, protect transactions, encourage referrals, and increase the likelihood that clients choose the agent again.
The commission is not created by the break.
It is created by becoming the professional clients trust when an important decision must be made.
Professional Foundation
Being busy is not the same as exercising professional judgment.
Answering every notification immediately may make an agent appear active. It does not guarantee that the agent is accurate, thoughtful, prepared, or useful.
Clients are not paying merely for access to the MLS, a lockbox, or a phone capable of receiving seventy-eight notifications before lunch.
They are paying for judgment.
Protect it accordingly.
Apply It to Your Business
- Which decisions in your business have the greatest financial or professional consequences?
- At what time of day do you normally make those decisions?
- Which routine choices could become checklists, templates, or documented systems?
- What notifications can be silenced during high-value work?
- Where can you place a ten-minute reset before a consequential client conversation?
- What one change will you test during the next seven days?
Harvard Business Review, “What Umpires’ Calls Reveal About Our ‘Attention Budget,’” November–December 2022.
National Bureau of Economic Research, The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field .
American Psychological Association, “Cognitive Fatigue.”
University of California, Irvine—Gloria Mark, research on attention, technology, multitasking, and stress.
University of California, Irvine, summary of attention switching, cognitive load, stress, and productivity research.
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Use this one-page P.A.U.S.E. framework before pricing discussions, offers, negotiations, inspections, or any client recommendation where professional judgment matters.
Print it. Keep it beside your desk. Add it to your listing or buyer materials. Use it as a quick reset before making a decision that could affect your client’s money, risk, or future.
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Why iNVISIQ Studies Research Outside Real Estate
Some of the best ideas for becoming a better real estate professional aren't found in real estate at all.
They're found in psychology, education, behavioral economics, medicine, aviation, professional sports, military leadership, and dozens of other professions where people make high-consequence decisions every day.
That's where we look first.