Dustin Brome (0:00)

The year is 2025. And what works today for getting leads and getting new clients into your business is different than what worked a year or two or three years ago. We're going to talk today about what is working for real estate agents right now, today. To get you the most new leads and the most new clients as fast as possible. The Massive Agent podcast with lead generation tips and strategies to get you more leads and sell more homes. I love to buy houses. I like to sell houses. It takes brass balls to sell real estate. Wait a min. The leads are weak. You're weak. I've had better. Oh, have I got your attention now? Here's your host, Dustin Brome. What is up, everybody? Welcome to episode 372 of the Massive Agent Podcast. I am your host, Dustin Brome here in Salt Lake City, Utah. And Today it's like 65 degrees. I was wearing shorts and a tank top outside, it's winter. Not supposed to do that in Utah, but here we are. Love it. I'm freaking fired up for this episode today. I don't know why this concept, this topic is just interesting because so much has changed. I've been in real estate for about 14 years now, and what worked 14 years ago definitely does not work today for getting business. For marketing your listings. I mean, I was a heavy Craigslist user back in the day. I remember getting a listing, like getting a tour, factory virtual tour, going to. To Craigslist. Yeah, I just said it and then I forgot the name. You go to Craigslist, you post a link, you're like, here's a couple things. And the phone would ring like it was. It was crazy how well that worked. Social was not nearly what it is today. We didn't have AI tools. There was no chat GPT. There was certainly no automation, so. And by the way, people were still advertising in the yellow Pages. Like I remember getting pitched on yp.com for just ridiculous changes. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work today. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. And so this episode today is meant for you as an agent, to know exactly what's working now and what's dead or what's less effective than ever so that you know where to focus your time, your money and your resources to build that lead gen machine that's going to keep business coming in the door for you and your company. So let's jump into that. Let's start with the less effective. And by the way, state, I have a really cool tool that I've been using for a few years now that I'm going to share with you to automate, like in a good way, to automate. For example, if you post to an Instagram reel, it'll automatically copy the caption. It'll copy everything and post it on TikTok. Or if you post on TikTok, it'll remove the watermark and post it on YouTube shorts. You can automate a lot of that, like the mechanical posting stuff. And I'll share that tool with you here in a minute. It's super, super affordable and there's even a free version. It's incredible. Stay tuned and I'll share that here in just a second. So let's talk the least effective. Like, what is less effective today than a few years ago as far as generating leads? Well, let's be honest. Cold calling. Cold calling is less effective. Why? People don't want to be interrupted by a random phone call that they're not expecting. You don't, you don't like to be interrupted. Most people, a lot of people these days, and certainly more now than a year ago, you have unknown callers blocked or unknown callers silenced. So right in your iPhone, you go in there into the settings and you're just like silence unknown callers. So if somebody's calling you and they're not in your contacts, it goes straight to voicemail. So you get weeded out instantly. More people are doing that as the day days go by. There's all these apps that block spam callers, like Call Protect and like AT and T even has their own. There's all these different ones. What's that other one? There's a blue one that I use to limit spam calls so that on caller ID it pops up as possible spam because it's reported by other people every day that goes by. If you're randomly calling strangers, you know, true cold calling, it's just becoming less effective. It's becoming harder to do because you're getting blocked and people just have less tolerance for it. And there's more technology tools to block you from even getting to them in the first place. Not to mention the FCC rules that were changing that, the TCPA thing, I don't even remember what the hell that stands for, but they had the, the FCC and the TP TCPA law changes that were supposed to take take effect January 27, but they postponed that. That was going to dramatically change how cold calling is done or how you have to go about it. Right. It didn't straight up outlaw it, but you certainly had to jump through Some new hoops or change some things. So all of those take, take into account when you are, if anything you're doing is interrupting people when they're not expecting you. It's just less effective every day that goes by. Cold calling is one of those things. Mass texting, if you're mass texting to strangers, it's much less effective today than it was a year ago. One of the big reasons why, first off, people get so many of them. So I know one of the, one of the super attractive things about texting is 100% of people actually see the text because it shows up on their lock screen. They get a notification. It, you know, it's not just caught up in an email inbox somewhere. Everyone sees 100% of the texts. However, that means that if it's, if it's spam, they have less tolerance for that spammy text that comes out of the blue. So people are reporting text as spam, reporting them as junk. On the iPhone, you just click one button, report as junk, it reports it to the carriers, blocks it, and deletes it from your messages. So if you're sending mass texts, it may have worked well, you may have gotten a few nibbles, few bites, but it's becoming less effective as technology prevents that from happening. It prevents spammy from getting through to consumers. So mass texting to strangers, right? Just saying, hey, here's a list of people in this community. You mass text everybody, they've never heard from you before. You don't even have permission to do it. That is much less effective and will continue to be so moving forward. Portal leads less effective. Well, okay, maybe not less, maybe not less effective. But portal leads like Zillow, realtor.com homes.com they may be as effective. And I know a lot of big teams, a lot of high producers absolutely lean on, you know, buying leads From Zillow or realtor.com if their effectiveness stays the same. Right? And there's, there's question, it's question whether or not that's true. But, but the price keeps going up because they're more in demand. They're more in demand than ever. In fact. This is crazy. If you are purchasing leads from realtor.com or Zillow or whatever, there's a, there's a stat. And here's the, the gist of it, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something along the lines of a hundred million leads were sold. I think this was in 2023, over a hundred million real estate leads were sold. To agents in 2023. That's interesting because there were only about 5 million transactions happening that year. Isn't that wild? So a hundred million leads are being sold to agents, but only 5 million transactions actually, actually happening. Which means that most of those leads that you're paying for are garbage. They're not very good, or at least they're not going to transact for many, many, many, many years. Some of them are being resold. Resold because people are visiting Zillow, then they're going to Redfin, then they're going to homes.com and they're becoming leads in all these different places. It's. I'm not trying to discourage you or telling you you should never buy leads because there absolutely is a place for it. But don't, don't confuse yourself and don't dissuade your. Don't trick yourself into thinking that they're as good today as they were a year or two years ago. They're just becoming more expensive. And so as the price goes up, you have to reevaluate. Does this still make sense to do? Is it worth it? Is there still, still an ROI on it? Maybe the answer is yes, and maybe your margins are just getting less, but it's worth talking about. Those are the less effective things. Let's talk about what's more effective today, in 2025, moving forward. I believe YouTube is more effective now than ever. It's a, it's a better. It's a better use of time. It's a better lead gen strategy to commit to than it ever has been. And I know this runs counter to what a lot of agents think is, well, you know, it's kind of too late. Everyone already has a YouTube. Everyone's doing it. There's already four people in my market that are, you know, that have YouTube channels that are doing videos or four or 40 in your market. And you're like, well, that ship has sailed. It's too late. I disagree. I completely disagree for a lot of different reasons. But, but YouTube leads are converting at higher rates than social media leads for sure. And you're not paying per lead when you, you're absolutely paying with time and effort. And sometimes you're investing in editors and, you know, video quality and like, all that stuff. Right? Of course. But it's one of those things where once the snowball gets going, it gets better and better. It just starts bringing in more leads and more leads and more leads. Because YouTube, you get more views over time rather than on social media. You post Something, and then it gradually gets less and less and less, and eventually nobody sees it. So YouTube works really well. And you're getting people who are coming to the conclusion that they want to hire you on their own. Like, you're not having to convince them you're just delivering great information. You're giving them education on a topic they're searching for on YouTube. Because remember, YouTube is a search engine. It's not a social platform. There are some social components to it. I get it. But it is a search engine. People go there for context and information, not, you know, not for just the quick little hit. That's what they get on social. So if you have a YouTube channel or you have one like myself, and you're just kind of like, you know, putt, putting along, you haven't really doubled down, you haven't really made a huge investment or a real commitment, but you're. You're putting stuff out there. Double down, triple down. Yes. I'm talking to myself. YouTube is one of those things that I just need to commit to and do at a higher level because it's way too valuable. It's so powerful. It's absolutely incredible how many agents I meet that I'm like that, who recognize me, that come up to me at a conference or something, which is super humbling, by the way. And I just assume that they listen to the podcast or it's from social. But so many of those people are like, hey, I see your videos on YouTube, I see your podcast on YouTube, and it's like, holy crap. Like, I didn't think that many people saw it, but they do. It's incredible. So YouTube. Not that every one of you has to do it, but if you're going to commit to YouTube, it's more effective now than it ever has been before. And the ship has not sailed. There's still a great opportunity if you stay consistent and do great stuff on YouTube. Something else that's more effective, that is becoming more effective as time goes on. Email marketing. So we saw this with the. The tic tac, tic Tac, the TikTok ban, right when TikTok went away for what was like 18 hours, where it disappeared for like 18 hours or whatever that was. If you had built your entire business on TikTok and you didn't have an Instagram following, you didn't have a Facebook following, you didn't have a YouTube channel, you didn't have an email list, you are freaking out. You. Your butt puckered so much, you took a chunk out of the seat when TikTok went away, you're like, my entire livelihood has disappeared because you built it all in one place with no diversification. That's dangerous. Look, I'm all for leaning into the platforms that work for you. So Maybe that is TikTok, maybe it's Instagram. But you need to also be building an email list because you own your list. You're following on Instagram, you're following on, on TikTok, your subscribers on YouTube. YouTube owns those, your followers on TikTok. TikTok owns those. You don't control those. You can't just take those people elsewhere with you. But your email list, you own it. You own the contact information, you own the list, you can do what you want with it. You can transfer it to different platforms, different email services. You own your email list. And sending emails is still super valuable. People are still seeing your emails in their inbox. It's a very effective use, It's a very effective means of marketing and I think it's dramatically underused by agents. You use it for like drip campaigns and whatnot, but you're not using it as a marketing tool, which it is with newsletters, with updates, with even promoting some of the content you're doing on social and on YouTube and sending it out in like a email digest to, to people who actually want that stuff. It's just a. I, I believe email marketing is wildly underestimated and undervalued. What else is effective? Posting content on social. It's. Social media is such a powerful tool. It changes and iterates and, and the way you do it and what works and what doesn't changes. But social media is still a great place to be. It's a great tool to use. It's a must use tool for real estate agents for sure. And there's this tool that I've been using for a few years. I've used it in a lot of different ways. Like for example, if you do a podcast, it could take the podcast, upload it to, to YouTube and post the podcast, like the audio version as a YouTube video. In the early days of this podcast, that's what I did. I was like, I may as well just, you know, connect those two and let it go up there. It wasn't very high quality for sure because it was just like the, the podcast with waveform. But nonetheless, I, I had views and I had people listen to the podcast through YouTube because that's where they would rather listen. I automated that. So all I had to do is post the podcast. I Just had to publish it and it went to YouTube. Other ways I've used it is if I post a TikTok, it automatically strips the watermark and post it as an Instagram reel or vice versa. Or there's. So there's this tool called Repurpose, right? So go to massiveagentsociety.com repurpose I believe there's a free trial if you guys want to try it out. Massive agentsociety.com repurpose and try out this tool. Okay. Repurpose IO it lets you connect your different platforms, then automate posting from one and then it goes to the other. And it's gotten so much better over the years where, like with the TikTok example, one of the problems was before, if you just automated it and you posted TikTok and you wanted it to go to Instagram, it would post the TikTok watermark on the Instagram video. Well, you don't want that. You absolutely can't have that. Well, repurpose got so good where you can actually strip the watermark off of it and it does it automatically. There's so. So it's a way for you to post once and have it go to all the different places, but have it go natively and posted in the specific way that each platform needs rather than just one size fits all. It's an incredible tool. It's gotten so good. It's called Repurpose. I love it. I use it myself. I recommend you do the paid version because you can connect all your different platforms. Super inexpensive. MassiveAgentsociety.com repurpose to get a trial, it's either a trial or a discount. I apologize, I cannot remember. But definitely use that link and try out Repurpose. It's going to save you time. You can be in more places at once. Incredible tool. So social content is. Is incredible. That's one of those AI and automation tools. But to. To end this right, taking from last week's episode about AI tools and AI for real estate agents, one of the things that's becoming more effective and will continue to be at a rapid, rapid pace is AI and lead automation. So AI is changing how agent, how agents generate leads. It's changing how you nurture and follow up with those leads. There's, there's tools available where you can have a custom video so you could send a customized personalized video to literally every lead where your mouth says their name. Like it pulls their name from the lead, it automatically puts it into the AI tool. You can Record one video saying hey Peter, but then it says, hey Susan, hey Mary, hey Sally, hey Lexi. And it looks exactly like you because the rest of the video is you. It just changes that one little spot. So every single lead gets a video that, that they think you created just for them. And it happens instantly. That's a, that's available now. Like you can do that today. Just imagine six months from now or a year from now. There's tools like Fellow that automate and use AI tools to nurture your leads. So where you just upload your, your network to, to Fellow. And based on how many contacts you have, they, you know it. The way they price it is based on how many contacts you're giving them. So let's say you have a thousand people or 500 people in your database and you give it to Fellow. It just goes to town and nurtures those people for you. And it does a great job. It's very, very human, very personal. They use a lot of AI tools to do that. Incredible tool that a lot of these big teams and big producers are using that you as a solo agent, an independent agent can use yourself. It's called Fellow F E L L O. I have no affiliation to them whatsoever. I'm just a fan of their product. And Fellow, if you hear this, let's talk. Because a business relationship like, come on now, I love your product. Predictive analytics are another thing that AI is, has made possible. This is, this exists now. It's becoming more robust every single day. Predictive analytics, AI can know and tell you based on available data and what people are doing on social and you know, different data points here or there. It knows when somebody's about to list their house. It knows when somebody is about to want to buy a house. It knows when they're about to refinance like it. And so it notifies you, hey, these people are going to be selling in the next, you know, three months. That stuff exists now. It's going to become more accurate and more accurate and more accurate moving forward. So, so look at predictive analytics. The last thing that I want to end with what is most effective, what's becoming more effective and will continue to become more effective over time is building a personal brand. You have to build a brand because when you have a brand and people know it, they trust it, they, they recognize it. And you can bring that brand anywhere, you can do anything with that brand. So you do that by being yourself, by posting regular content, by thinking of who you're trying to reach, and then creating content for those people, with them in mind. If you're working, if you want to work with for, for example, military members who are relocating to your area because they're pushing, excuse me, they're PCSing, you have them in mind. You're like, okay, these people, they're moving from this place to my market. What would they need to know? What do they need to know? What are mistakes that are made in this process that they don't know about? And you can create content for them, you can create emails for them, you can create downloadable guides for those people. And the more you do that, and you just give and give and educate and you build credibility, you build authority. And the more visible you are, the more places you're showing up in, which is where the Repurpose tool could be super valuable, right? If you're just posting on Instagram right now, then all of a sudden, just by doing the same thing, you're posting on Instagram, YouTube shorts, TikTok with one push of the button, and all of a sudden you're being seen in more places. This is how you build a brand and you stay consistent over time. Those with those agents with personal brands are going to thrive moving forward. And I believe that, that a time will come in the near future where if you do not have a personal brand that people recognize, if, if no one remembers you, you quite simply won't exist. You quite simply won't be getting any business or not enough to survive on anyways. So I'd encourage you to lean into social media, lean into building a brand, do the things that you already know that you have to do, because you just, you can't be lazy anymore. It's too competitive. You can't be lazy anymore. Technology is, is making those that are really leaning into using tech tools are just going to crush those that don't. As simple as that. So which one do you want to be? I encourage you to dive in, use repurpose, try that out, and really focus on building a brand with consistency and authenticity because it's so powerful. I started this podcast seven years ago. It's unbelievable how many doors have opened to me just because I started to do a podcast every week for real estate agents who are entrepreneurial. And, and I turned around one day and I'm like, holy crap, I've built a personal brand just by being consistent and talking to the same people over and over and improving and getting better each time. Thank you for listening this week, guys. I appreciate it. Make sure that you check in with kcm. Keeping current matters be the advisor that your clients trust with keeping current matters. KCM gives you easy to understand market insights, ready to share graphics, scripts and tools you need to keep you looking like a pro. Try KCM for free today over@try kcm.com BAM and then level up your business with BAM X Courses Masterminds, a network of ambitious agents ready to push you higher. Join today over@nowbam.com and use code NOW Massive at checkout to get yourself a discount. Thank you so much for listening. Share this with any agent who needs to hear it. Your team leader, your broker. All of the above. I'll be back next week with another episode of the Massive Agent Podcast. Take care.