Eighty percent of sellers contacted only one agent before choosing, according to NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Your About page is usually the last thing read before that single call gets made, or not made.
The About page and the bio are two different jobs
Agents merge these two pages, and the merged version does neither job well.
The bio is a facts page. Name, licence, brokerage, areas served, property types, years in business, languages, written as plain statements a machine can read and quote. Its audience includes search engines and AI assistants, which need checkable facts in sentences. We covered that job separately in our post on writing an agent bio for AI search, and this page does not repeat it.
The About page is a judgement page. Its audience is one nervous human who has never met you, is about to hand you the largest asset they own, and is trying to work out whether that is a mistake. Facts alone do not answer that. Neither does warmth alone.
So write the bio to be quotable and the About page to be convincing. When both exist, they support each other. When one page tries to be both, it usually becomes a list of adjectives.
What a cautious seller is actually checking
They are not enjoying your story. They are running through a short list of risks, mostly without naming them.
Is this person real and current? A photo that looks like a person, a brokerage that exists, a licence they could verify, a site that has been touched this year. This check takes about four seconds and most of it happens before any reading.
Do they work where I live? Not your city. Their neighbourhood. An agent who lists three areas by name passes this instantly, and an agent who says "the Lower Mainland and surrounding areas" does not.
Have they handled a situation like mine? An estate sale, a strata with a levy, a relocation on a deadline, a home that failed to sell last year. This is the check that most About pages ignore completely.
Will dealing with them be uncomfortable? Whether you will push, how you communicate, what happens when there is bad news. Sellers are quietly afraid of being pressured, and nothing on a typical About page addresses it.
Would I be embarrassed to introduce them to my family? This one is unspoken and decides more than agents like to admit.
NAR's data lines up with that list. Reputation was the most important factor for 35 percent of sellers choosing a listing agent, honesty and trustworthiness for 22 percent, and knowledge of the neighbourhood for 11 percent. Commission was the deciding factor for 4 percent. The page should be built for the first three.
Why the dream-home sentence fails
"Passionate about helping people find their dream home" is probably true. That is the problem.
Read it as a stranger. It names no place, no property type, no client, no year, and no evidence. Every licensed agent within fifty kilometres could publish it today without lying. A sentence that any competitor could copy unchanged is not describing you.
It also spends the most valuable space on the page, the opening, on a claim the reader cannot check or act on. Google's helpful content guidance asks whether a page offers original information or analysis rather than restating what is already everywhere, and this sentence is the most restated line in the industry.
The fix is not more feeling. It is replacing the claim with something specific enough to be wrong. "I list townhouses and detached homes in three neighbourhoods on the east side, and about half my sellers are downsizing after twenty years in the same house" tells a reader where you work, whom you work with, and whether that is them.
Naming who you do not serve
This is the fastest improvement available on the page, and the one most agents refuse to make.
Write a short paragraph that says what you do not do. Not commercial. Not raw land. Not rentals under a certain value. Not out-of-area referrals you would be guessing at. Then say what happens to that person instead, which is a referral to someone who does it properly.
Three things happen when you publish that. Enquiries you would have handled badly stop arriving. Readers who do match now believe the rest of the page, because a stated limit reads as evidence that you were being honest in the other paragraphs too. And you have proved you made a choice, which only an agent with real experience has anything to do.
The fear is losing business. What you lose is contacts you would have declined, referred out, or served without much conviction. Our post on whether agents should niche down works through that tradeoff in more detail.
Proof that survives a skeptical read
Every claim on this page should be one a stranger could check without asking you.
Reviews that name something specific beat a star rating. "She handled the strata paperwork when the building had a levy dispute" persuades a seller with a strata problem. "Great agent, highly recommend" persuades nobody, because it could be about anyone. Our post on testimonials that convince covers how to get the specific version.
Licence and brokerage details belong here in plain text. They are easy to verify, and a page that makes verification easy reads as a page with nothing to hide.
Awards and production figures need the source and the year attached, and they need to be current. A number that was accurate three years ago is a live claim today, and it will be raised at the listing appointment.
Link to the work rather than describing it. A sentence pointing at your recent sales page does more than a paragraph asserting your track record, because the reader can go and look.
Solo, team, and who actually answers the phone
The client's real question is who they will be dealing with at nine on a Sunday night.
If you work solo, say so and say what that means: you answer, you show, you negotiate, and here is what happens when you are on holiday. Solo is an advantage when it is described as continuity rather than left as an absence of support.
If you work on a team, describe the arrangement plainly and name the handoffs. Who runs showings, who handles paperwork, who takes after-hours calls. A seller who expected you and got a coordinator without warning feels misled even when the work was good. The same arrangement, stated in advance, reads as an organised operation. Our post on team websites versus agent websites covers how this plays out across the whole site.
Either way, avoid the plural that hides a solo operation. "Our team of dedicated professionals" on a one-person business is a small lie that a client will notice at exactly the wrong moment.
Photographs and the small credibility gap
The purpose of the photo is that a person recognises you when you arrive at their door.
A portrait edited past that point creates a gap between the page and the doorstep, and the gap registers at the first meeting, before you have said anything. A current photo in ordinary light beats a stylised one from five years ago.
One image of you working in the area you serve is worth more than a second studio shot. A real street, a real building, weather that exists. It supports the geographic claim you made two paragraphs earlier.
Stock photography of strangers shaking hands over a table does the opposite of what it is meant to. Everybody recognises it, and recognising it makes the reader wonder what else on the page is generic.
What the page should end with
A next step, sized to a reader who is still evaluating.
Someone finishing your About page has not decided to sell with you. Asking them to book a listing appointment asks for more than they have. A short call about their specific situation, or a question they can send and get answered, matches where they are.
Put it at the end and repeat it near the top for the reader who decided early. And say what happens after they press it, because uncertainty about what follows stops more contacts than the ask itself. Our post on the contact page covers what that promise should be.
The takeaway
The bio tells a machine who you are. The About page tells a nervous human whether hiring you is safe, and it has to do that in one pass, because most sellers never contact a second agent. Replace the dream-home sentence with the areas and client types you actually serve, state who you do not serve, put checkable proof next to every claim, and be specific about who answers the phone. The page gets shorter and works better.
