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I had a client who’d taken about 96 listings.
That’s a lot of listings. That’s a busy, respected agent.
But when we pulled her data, something jumped off the page.
Forty-five of those sellers moved out of her area.
Forty-five families packed up their lives and bought homes somewhere else. New cities. New states. And every single one of them needed an agent on the other end of that move.
Do you know how many referrals she got from those 45 moves?
Four.
Four out of 45.
Now, here’s what that means in plain math. Every one of those sellers who moved out of her area was an opportunity to refer them to an agent in their new city and earn a referral fee, typically around 25% of that agent’s commission check. Forty-five opportunities. She caught four. The other 41 walked right out the door, and the money went with them.
She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t bad at her job. She just didn’t have a system to catch it.
So we put one in.
Now that money is coming back to her, and she gets to work less to earn it.
That’s what data does. Data tells you a story. And the story usually tells you where you’re missing money. Without a database, you’re going to miss a lot of things in your business, and you won’t even know you missed them, because you’ll never see the numbers.
A Hundred Thousand Followers And Nobody To Call
In my last post, I talked about how we have all the tools and technology in the world, and we’re missing relationships. Not just a little. Grossly missing them.
That’s why you can have 100,000 followers and still not be able to call five people and ask for a referral.
Think about that.
We’re not only missing business. We’re missing referral opportunities, because we’re not building relationships. A follower is not a relationship. A like is not a relationship. Somebody watching your story while they’re waiting in the carpool line is not going to hand you their family’s biggest financial decision just because you posted a pretty kitchen.
Now let me show you what’s possible when you do build relationships.
Say you develop real relationships with 20 people.
And say each of those 20 people gives you two referrals.
That’s 40 new opportunities added to your pipeline. And now you’ve got 60 people in your database instead of 20: the original 20, plus the 40 they sent you.
Now think about what happens if that keeps multiplying.
Those 40 each send you two. Then those send you two. Two by two by two by two.
Folks love to talk about network marketing. This is the network. It’s been sitting in your phone the whole time.
That’s why you have to think about your business from a completely different level. Structurally. Foundationally.
You’re Not A Realtor. You’re A Business Owner.
I need you to hear this one.
You’re not a realtor.
You’re a business owner who holds a real estate license.
Those are two different things, and you have to master both. Separate the business from the sales license, and treat them like two skill sets, because they are.
But if you have to pick one to master first, master the business first. Sell second.
Here’s why. Sales skills without a business behind them get you a good month. Then a slow month. Then a panic month. Business skills give the sales somewhere to land, so the good months stack on top of each other instead of disappearing.
And when you do work on your sales skills, focus on the relationship side. Not closing techniques. Not clever comebacks. Relationships.
If you’re a newer agent, or you’re realizing you’ve been running on the license alone, the How to Start & Structure Your Real Estate Business Master Course is where you build the business side. It covers the CEO mindset, your economic and activity plans, the financial metrics you should be watching, your sales systems and funnels, your lead generation systems, and how to categorize your sphere of influence. It doesn’t teach you how to show a house. It teaches you how to run the company that shows the house.
BUILD THE BUSINESS BEHIND THE BADGE → https://theceoofrealestate.com/startstructure
A Database Is Not A Contact List
If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you’ve heard me talk about turning your database into a databank.
And I want to be very clear about what that means, because a lot of agents hear “database” and picture a list of names in a spreadsheet.
That’s not it.
Your database can become one of the most valuable income-producing resources in your business, because it has the potential to multiply itself over and over again. But not because you have a bunch of names sitting in it.
A name without a relationship doesn’t matter. It’s just stored information.
The value comes from what you do with those names.
So stop looking at your database as a contact list. For the love of God, I want you to start looking at it as a relationship management system.
Because everybody in that database represents somebody.
Somebody who might buy.
Somebody who might sell.
Somebody who might invest.
Somebody who might know somebody.
Every row in that spreadsheet is a person with a family, a job, a lease ending, a baby on the way, a parent getting older, a kid heading off to college. Every one of those life moments is a door. A client isn’t a one-time closing. A client is a lifetime relationship, and every chapter of their life comes with a transaction. Sometimes two.
Once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it. And once you see it, you need a strategy to build it.
Gather, Organize, Nurture, Convert
I’m going to give you four simple steps.
These aren’t the exact steps I teach in my strategy. But if I had to take everything I teach about the database and put it into bullet points, all of it would fall under these four sections.
Step one: gather.
Think about it like cooking. Before you make anything, you pull everything out of the cabinets and bring it to the counter. Your database is the same.
→ Pull every contact out of your phone
→ Export your email contacts
→ Go through your social media friends and followers, and write down the ones you actually know
→ Dig up old transaction files, open house sign-in sheets, and business cards stuffed in your car’s cup holder
→ Think through your circles: church, your kids’ school, the gym, your old job, your neighborhood
Then bring all of it into one pot: your CRM. Not three spreadsheets, a notes app, and a shoebox. One place.
Step two: organize.
Now think about it like cleaning your house. Everything’s on the counter. Time to put it where it belongs.
Who’s a buyer? Who’s a seller? Who might buy in three months? Who might be an investor? Who’s the person who always knows somebody and might send you referrals?
Organize them in a way that makes sense to you.
Now, I’ll be real with you. You could organize your database in 50,000 different ways. And I can already see my overthinkers building 8,000 categories, color-coding every one of them, and never making a single phone call.
Don’t do that.
A lot of those categories are just distractions. There are a few basic ones that matter, and those are the ones I teach. If you want to know exactly which ones, and how to set them up so your database works for you instead of overwhelming you, that’s what I’m walking through live.
I’m hosting the free 0 to 10 Million Dollar Real Estate Database From 0 Contacts in Just 6-12 Months Masterclass on Thursday, Nov 12 at 6 PM ET, on Zoom. If you caught the first one on October 28, come back and bring a friend. If you missed it, this is your next shot, and I don’t want you to miss it twice. I’ll show you how to build a database from zero contacts, how to organize it without drowning in categories, how to nurture it over time, and how it’s built to add about 12 more deals to your pipeline over the next six to 12 months.
Step three: nurture.
Once your data is organized, you have everything you need to nurture people and build the relationship.
The strategy I teach is systematic relationship building over time, with technology in the background and the relationship in the front.
That means your CRM reminds you about the birthday, the home anniversary, and the follow-up date. But you make the call. You send the text. You ask how their mom’s surgery went. The technology keeps you on schedule. You keep the relationship alive.
Step four: convert.
When the relationship is real and the timing is right, that person becomes a client.
And then? You repeat the cycle. Back to nurturing. Past clients become repeat clients. Repeat clients send referrals. Referrals become new relationships.
Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
That’s what a database really is: a future relationship funnel. And it’s one you build yourself.
Why I’d Rather Build It Than Buy It
I don’t understand why we put so much stock, time, and emphasis into buying what we could build.
I have more faith in what I can build than in what I can buy.
That’s why I don’t want to buy leads from Zillow. I don’t know what they’re doing to pre-qualify those people. I don’t know what questions they’re asking. I don’t know who else those people are talking to. I’m paying for a name and a phone number, and I’m competing with whoever else got the same name and phone number.
With my database, I get to build relationships with people myself.
And the relationships I build? Those people aren’t doing business with anybody else but me.
That’s the advantage of building a database. You’re not renting attention. You’re owning relationships.
My database has been professionally appraised at over $10 million. One relationship in it has generated $192,000 in GCI over 19 months. That didn’t come from a lead I bought. It came from a person I kept in touch with.
## Run Your Numbers Backward
This is the part most agents skip. To run a business, you have to know your numbers.
So let’s work backward from a goal.
Say you want 24 closings a year.
If you’re converting about 50% of your appointments into closings, you need 48 appointments to get those 24 closings.
Now, not every appointment you set actually happens. People cancel. Things come up. Using that same 50% ratio, you’d need to set about 96 appointments to end up with 48 that actually happen.
So the next question is: how many conversations do you need to have to set 96 appointments?
Depending on how well you convert conversations, it might be somewhere around 2,000 to 4,000 conversations over the year.
Spread across a working year of about 250 days, that’s roughly eight to 16 conversations a day.
Now look at the other side of the math.
Twenty-four transactions at $10,000 each is $240,000.
So let me ask you.
Would you have eight to 16 conversations a day for a $240,000 year?
Why wouldn’t you?
A lot of times, it’s not because you don’t want to. It’s because you don’t know how to build it. You don’t have a database big enough to support that many conversations, and you don’t have a system that makes those conversations feel natural instead of forced.
Here’s how to run this for your own business this week:
→ Write down how many closings you want next year
→ Look at your actual appointment-to-closing ratio from this year. If you don’t know it, start tracking it today, and use 50% as a placeholder
→ Do the same for appointments set vs. appointments held
→ Work backward to the number of appointments you need to set
→ Then estimate the conversations it’ll take, and divide by the days you plan to work
That final number is your daily conversation target. It’s not a guess anymore. It’s math.
And once it’s math, it stops being scary. It’s just a number you show up for.
Plug The Leak She Didn’t Know She Had
Let’s go back to my client with the 96 listings.
Forty-five sellers moved away. Four referrals.
When you see a number like that, the answer isn’t “work harder.” She was already working hard. The answer is to build a system that catches what’s falling through the cracks.
Here’s what a simple move-out referral system can look like:
→ At every listing consultation, ask where they’re headed next. Write it in your database
→ Tag every seller who’s leaving your area, along with their destination city
→ Build relationships with a few strong agents in the cities your clients move to most often
→ Before the closing, make the introduction yourself, warmly, so your client feels taken care of instead of handed off
→ Track every referral you send, and follow up until it closes
Now let’s run the math on what she was missing. Say the average commission on the other end of those moves was $8,000, and she earned 25% as a referral fee. That’s $2,000 per referral. Forty-one missed referrals is $82,000.
Eighty-two thousand dollars. From clients she’d already served.
That’s not a lead generation problem. That’s a data problem. And it’s exactly the kind of thing a database shows you once you start paying attention to it.
You Don’t Want More Closings
A lot of real estate agents think they want more closings.
You don’t want more closings.
You want predictable income.
There’s a difference. More closings with no system behind them means more chaos, more burnout, and the same feast or famine cycle on a bigger scale. Predictable income means you know roughly what’s coming in, where it’s coming from, and what you need to do every day to keep it coming.
Working harder is not the answer.
The database is the foundation for working smarter. With a database, you start paying attention to the relationships and the business patterns that make you more money. And while you’re doing that, the relationships themselves keep growing, which makes you more money on top of that.
There’s no way you’re not going to do better in business when you do better at relationships.
Seed Time And Harvest
I want to tell you why I got so serious about this strategy in the first place.
God showed me that the database is a manifestation of seed time and harvest.
Seed time and harvest is one of the first principles God put in place, and it’s not based on performance. It’s based on a system. You plant. You tend. You wait. You harvest. And then you plant again.
That’s exactly what a database is. Every name you gather is a seed. Every time you organize it, you’re preparing the soil. Every call, every text, every birthday card is water and sunlight. And conversion is the harvest.
Most agents want the harvest without the seed. They want the closing without the relationship. They want to buy the fruit instead of planting the tree.
But a tree you plant keeps producing season after season. Fruit you buy is gone the day you eat it.
So I want to hear from you in the comments. If you pulled your data right now, where do you think your business is leaking money? Past clients you never followed up with? Referrals you never asked for? Sellers who moved away? Drop it below. I’m reading every single comment and answering your questions myself.
Coach Cheese 💕
