Most agents walk into conversations trying to convince people they need real estate services.

That’s backwards.

People don’t move because you’re convincing. They move because life is moving them. New baby. Job change. Divorce. Inheritance. Lease ending. Downsizing. Parents need care. School district concerns.

Your job isn’t to create urgency. Your job is to identify it.

Here’s the framework I teach every agent I coach:

The Open-Ended Life Question

“Are there any life changes coming up that might impact your housing situation?”

That’s it. Then you stop talking.

I had an agent tell me “Cheesette, that feels too vague. I need to be more specific.”

No. Vague is the point. When you ask a specific question like “are you thinking about selling?” you put them in a yes/no box. They say no, conversation ends.

When you ask about life changes, you open a door to everything. And people love talking about their lives. New jobs. Kids going to college. Parents aging. They’ll tell you everything if you just ask and listen.

The Situational Possibilities

After you ask, give them context: “Could be anything – new job, new school, lease ending, needing more space, thinking about upgrading…”

Why? Because people need permission to share. They don’t always connect their life situation to real estate. When you name possibilities, they recognize themselves: “Oh yeah, my daughter’s starting kindergarten next year and we’ve been talking about moving to a better school district.”

Boom. Life trigger identified.

Let me break down the real numbers behind why consistency beats volume every single time, because most agents are making financial decisions based on feelings instead of data.

Maya’s systematic approach looked like this: Every Sunday evening, she spent 2 hours creating content for the entire week. She used a simple batching system I teach my coaching clients – one photo shoot could generate 8-12 pieces of content. One market research session became 4 different educational posts. One successful closing became a testimonial, a market insight, and a behind-the-scenes story.

Her content reached an average of 200 people per post across all platforms. Over 52 weeks with consistent posting, that’s 10,400 brand impressions working for her while she was at her corporate job. But here’s the key: because her content was consistent and valuable, her engagement rate was 12% compared to the industry average of 3%. People weren’t just seeing her content – they were interacting with it, sharing it, and most importantly, remembering it.

Time is your only non-renewable resource in real estate. Every hour you spend on low-return activities is an hour you can’t spend on high-return activities that actually generate income.

If you spend three hours daily creating social media content instead of making database calls, you’re looking at 1,095 hours annually of execution time that generates zero appointments. Meanwhile, those same three hours spent on strategic conversations could generate 52 additional appointments per year at just one appointment per week.

Let’s say those appointments convert at a modest 25% rate – that’s 13 additional transactions annually. At an average commission of $8,000 per transaction, you just cost yourself $104,000 by choosing content creation over conversations.

The reality check you need to hear? Frustrated that leads are taking longer to convert? Feeling like business is scarce and the market’s to blame? The market conditions change. They fluctuate. This is part of being in business, part of the entrepreneur’s journey.

But what we’re seeing now is a revelation that agents never took the time to actually build a business. When the market was hot, everybody was closing deals not because they were skilled at business, but because it was just easy to convert leads. Now that things have slowed down, it’s exposing gaps in our businesses.

Here’s what I want you to understand: some of the best deals I’ve ever had – and easiest for that matter – came from agents who referred me business. I liked referral business as a new agent because most of the time those people came to me ready to go. When they came to me ready to buy, ready to sell, because they had something going on with another agent, those became my easiest to close transactions.

I decided to create a system around that. If you know anything about me, the CEO of Real Estate, it’s all about systems.

When the market slows down, most agents panic. They hustle harder. Work more hours. Stress more about where their next commission check is coming from.
But what if I told you a slow market is actually a gift?
A gift of time. A gift of space. A gift from God to finally build the business you’ve been dreaming of—one that funds your life instead of running it.
Let me show you how to use this market to transform from salesperson to CEO and escape the transactional real estate trap for good.