30 Stupid Things Real Estate Agents Do (and What to Do Instead)

Half of a typical agent's business now comes from people who already know them. Twenty-eight percent is repeat clients, another twenty-two percent is referrals from past clients. That is the National Association of Realtors' own 2026 Member Profile, and it means the most valuable thing most agents own is a list of people they have already made happy.

By D.J. Paris, president of sales and marketing at Kale Realty and host of the Keeping It Real Podcast. Every mistake below was named on the show by an agent who does this for a living. Their episode and the date are cited with each one.

Most of the 30 things below are small. Not calling when you send an offer. Emailing a contract with a typo in it. Letting a closed client go quiet. None of them will get you sued. All of them quietly cost you the half of your business that is supposed to come back.

I run recruiting for a Chicago brokerage and I host a podcast where I have interviewed hundreds of agents over more than five hundred episodes. Every item on this list came out of those interviews. Somebody who does this for a living named it, on the record. I did not make any of it up, and where a number is quoted I have linked the document it came from.

Here they are, what each one actually costs, and the steps to fix it.

The real problem: you are not losing to other agents

Agents ask me how to get more leads. Almost nobody asks me how to stop losing the ones they already earned.

Look at how sellers actually choose. NAR asked them, and the answer barely moves year to year: 37 percent went with a friend, neighbor or relative, and 29 percent used an agent they had already bought or sold with. That is 66 percent of all sellers, decided before any marketing happened. Personal contact from an agent got 5 percent. A website got 4 percent. An open house got 3 percent. Direct mail and yard signs got 2 percent each.

Then look at what happens next. Eighty percent of sellers contacted only one agent before choosing. Not three. One. Seventy-six percent of repeat buyers interviewed only one agent.

Put those together and the business stops looking like a competition. Nobody is lining you up against two rivals and picking the best listing presentation. One name comes to mind, that person gets the call, and the call is most of the way to the job. Everything on this list is either something that keeps your name from coming to mind, or something that burns the goodwill after it does.

The last number is the one that should bother you. Ninety-one percent of buyers say they would use their agent again or recommend them. Sixty-two percent already recommended, within a year. Your past clients are not withholding. They are willing, and most of them never hear from you again.

So the honest framing of this whole list is not that agents are bad at their jobs. It is that a lot of us are pouring effort into the top of the funnel while the part that already works goes unattended.

The offer and the other agent

1. Emailing an offer and never picking up the phone

What it looks like. You write the offer, you send it, you wait. Maybe you text your buyer that it is in.

What it costs. Carrie McCormick has raised this on my show twice, two years apart. The first time she was reacting to a Chicago top producer who had made a video about it because he had three listings in multiple offers, was getting around ten offers each, and not one agent called to ask whether the offer arrived or how it looked. The second time I asked her directly whether agents call when they send an offer on her listings. Most of the time, no.

Amy Duong Kim said the same thing on a separate episode, unprompted. Ali Garced covers it from the submitting side. Four separate producers, years apart, same complaint. That is as close to a consensus as this industry gets.

Here is the part agents miss. The listing agent is not annoyed by the call. The listing agent is reading the silence. Carrie's point was that when you do not call, the other side starts wondering how committed you are, and whether you will be reachable ten days before closing when something breaks. Your offer is a document. Your call is the evidence that a competent person is attached to it.

Do this instead.

1. Send the offer.
2. Call the listing agent within five minutes. Not a text. A call.
3. Say who you are, which property, and that the offer just went over.
4. Ask two questions: is there anything about how the seller wants offers structured that is not in the listing, and when does the seller expect to review.
5. Offer something useful. Your buyer is flexible on the closing date. Your buyer has seen it twice. Whatever is true.
6. Leave a voicemail with the same content if nobody picks up, then follow with a short text so there is a written trail.
7. Write down what you learn and tell your buyer the same day.

You will know it worked when listing agents start calling you back before they call the other offers, and when you start hearing things that were never in the MLS remarks.

2. Forwarding a bare DocuSign with nothing in the body of the email

What it looks like. The listing agent gets a notification that looks like it came from DocuSign. No note. No summary. Just a document to open and decode.

What it costs. Carrie McCormick described exactly this: the email looks like it is coming from DocuSign, so you cannot tell it is an offer, and you do not even know which agent sent it without going through the whole file. Her word for it was bewildering, and her read was that it is a disservice to the client, because now the person who has to present your offer to the seller has to do your work first.

Ali Garced gave the fix on her own episode, and hers is the version worth copying. She refuses to send the naked attachment. She writes out the terms so the listing agent can forward it straight to the seller. Her reasoning was blunt: "no one wants to read a paragraph," so it goes in bullets.

Do this instead. Put this in the body of every offer email, above the attachment.

1. Property address and your buyer's name.
2. Purchase price.
3. Earnest money amount and when it is going up.
4. Loan type, down payment percentage, and the lender's name and phone number.
5. Closing date, and whether you can move it.
6. Every contingency with its number of days, spelled out.
7. Any seller concession you are asking for, in dollars.
8. Anything that makes this buyer easy: they have seen it twice, they are not selling first, they will do a pre-inspection.
9. One line offering the listing agent a call.

That is a five-minute template you write once. Save it as an email snippet and fill in the numbers.

You will know it worked when listing agents start replying to your emails instead of just opening the attachment.

3. Sending the contract out with blanks and typos in it

What it looks like. Misspelled names. An old form. Blank lines where an initial goes. A purchase price that does not match the number written out in words.

What it costs. Carrie McCormick's ask was almost apologetic, which is what makes it land. She said she did not think it was too much to ask that a contract be accurate and that things be spelled correctly. This is someone who has been at the top of the Chicago market for two decades politely pointing out that a meaningful share of contracts arrive sloppy.

The damage is not legal, usually. It is inference. The other agent reads a careless document and concludes that the rest of the transaction will be careless too, and then prices that into how they advise their seller. In a multiple offer, you do not get told this is why you lost.

Do this instead.

1. Read the whole contract out loud before you send it. Out loud catches what your eyes skip.
2. Check the four things that are most often wrong: legal names spelled exactly as on the pre-approval, the address including unit number, the price in both numerals and words, and the date.
3. Confirm you are on the current form. Forms change and old ones live in everybody's templates.
4. Fill every blank. If something does not apply, write N/A rather than leaving it empty.
5. Attach what you promised to attach. Pre-approval or proof of funds goes with the offer, not after somebody asks.
6. Have somebody else look at it for your first twenty contracts. Your managing broker will do this and will be glad you asked.

You will know it worked when you stop getting emails that begin with a polite question about page three.

4. Going quiet the moment the contract is signed

What it looks like. You worked hard through acceptance. Then the file goes to attorney review and inspection and the client does not hear from you for nine days.

What it costs. Tony Clark described agents who are afraid to call their clients unless they have good news. That fear is the whole mechanism. Nothing has happened yet, so there is nothing to report, so you wait, and the client reads the silence as nobody driving.

Mitch Ribak gave me the tell for this and I have used it ever since. "The worst thing is when a Realtor has a client that goes, what's next?" If they are asking, expectations were never set. They are not curious. They are anxious.

Do this instead.

1. At the moment of acceptance, send the client a dated timeline of every step to closing, with who is responsible for each one.
2. Tell them the day of the week you will update them, and that you will update them on that day even when there is nothing new.
3. Then actually send the nothing-new update. "Inspection is Thursday, attorney has the file, nothing needed from you this week" is a complete and welcome message.
4. Set a calendar reminder for every one of those days for the whole contract period. Do not trust yourself to remember during a busy week.
5. Call, do not text, for anything that involves money, a deadline, or bad news.
6. Two days before closing, walk them through the closing itself: where, when, what to bring, what the wire instructions will and will not look like.

You will know it worked when nobody asks you what happens next.

5. Being rude to the agent on the other side

What it looks like. A short email. A tone on the phone. Telling your buyer, in front of your buyer, that the listing agent is an idiot.

What it costs. Ali Garced said it plainly on an episode about open houses: always be nice, never be rude, because you will be working with that agent again on this property or on the next one. She also pointed out the flip side, which is that a great agent across the table is a recruiting opportunity if you are building anything.

Chicago feels enormous until you have done thirty deals in one neighborhood. Then it is a small town with a large MLS. The agent you were short with in March is the one deciding between your offer and an identical one in September.

Do this instead.

1. Assume the other agent is busy, not hostile. Most of what reads as rudeness is a person with forty unread emails.
2. Never criticize the other agent in front of your client. It teaches your client that agents are unreliable, and you are an agent.
3. Keep the disagreement on the terms, never on the person. "My seller cannot do that date" is fine. "You clearly have never done this before" is not.
4. When they do something well, say so in writing. It takes eight seconds and it is remembered for years.
5. If you lose your temper, apologize the same day and specifically. It resets almost everything.

You will know it worked when you get told about an offer before it is submitted, or a listing before it goes live.

Taking and launching a listing

6. Buying the listing with a number you cannot defend

What it looks like. Two agents say the house is worth 500. You say 560 and you get the listing. Ninety days later you are asking the seller for the third price reduction.

What it costs. Ali Garced said she will never be the agent who claims she can sell your property for more than the last agent, because she does not want to set anybody up for disappointment. This is the one item on the list that also has a confirmed receipt in our own research bank, and it is the most expensive mistake on this page in raw dollars.

You do not win a listing at 560. You rent it. You pay for the photos, the staging consult, the open houses and ten weeks of your life, and then you either talk the seller down to what the first two agents said or you watch it expire and go to one of them anyway. Meanwhile the listing sits and accumulates days on market, which is the one thing you can never take back off it.

Do this instead.

1. Bring three sets of numbers to the appointment: what it sells for this month, what it sells for if they do the prep work you are about to recommend, and what happens if they list high.
2. Show the third scenario with real local examples. Pull two listings in their area that started high, and show the price history and the final sale price next to the days on market.
3. Say the number before they say theirs. If you ask what they want first, you are negotiating against yourself.
4. If they insist on a number you cannot support, make it a condition instead of a fight: you will take it at their number for fourteen days, with a written agreement to reduce to yours if you do not have an offer.
5. Be willing to walk. Say it out loud, kindly, once.

You will know it worked when your average days on market drops and your list-to-sale ratio goes up, even though you took fewer listings.

7. Rushing a seller to market before the house is ready

What it looks like. They want it live this weekend. It is not ready. It goes live this weekend.

What it costs. Natalie Taflinger named this as the worst thing she sees agents doing right now. She spent thirteen years in HR before real estate, so the interesting part of her episode is not that she knows the house is not ready. Every agent knows. It is that she has the conversation anyway, and she has a method for it.

Her method is the part to steal. She is not proposing a renovation. She is explicit that she is not asking anybody to redo a kitchen or put in granite. She is talking about low-hanging fruit, the cheap cosmetic work that makes the house photograph and show well, because that is where the return is.

The cost of skipping it is that your best week gets spent on an unready house. NAR's 2025 data says the median recently sold home was on the market four weeks, and 34 percent sold in the first one to two weeks. Your launch window is short and it does not come back.

Do this instead.

1. Walk the house before you talk about price, with a notepad, room by room.
2. Sort everything you see into three lists: free, under 500 dollars, and over 500 dollars.
3. Present only the first two lists. Declutter, deep clean, paint the one wall, fix the handle, replace the dead bulbs, get the cars off the driveway.
4. Put a number on the delay. "Ten days and about 400 dollars, and we go to market in the condition that gets the offers we just looked at."
5. Do not photograph anything until the list is done. Photos are the one step you cannot redo cheaply once the listing is live.
6. If they will not wait, get it in writing that you recommended the work and they declined, and then do your best job anyway.

You will know it worked when your listings stop needing a price reduction in week three.

8. Phone photos of a client's largest asset

What it looks like. Twelve pictures taken on a phone, at four in the afternoon, with the lights off and the blinds half shut.

What it costs. Devon Higgins put it in the right order on his episode: the listing starts with the photos. Everything downstream, the portal placement, the shares, the showings, is reacting to those images.

This is the first showing. Not the first marketing. The first showing. Hundreds of people will decide whether to visit the house based entirely on those frames, and you will never know which buyers you lost, because a buyer who scrolls past does not call to tell you why.

Do this instead.

1. Hire a real estate photographer. In most markets this is a couple hundred dollars and it is the highest-return money in the listing budget.
2. Shoot after the prep work from item 7, never before.
3. Every light in the house on, every blind fully up, every ceiling fan off.
4. Cars off the driveway and out of the frame. Bins out of sight. Nothing on the kitchen counters except one deliberate object.
5. Go to the shoot. Photographers shoot what is in front of them. You are the one who knows the primary suite is the selling point.
6. Order the photos in the sequence a buyer walks the house, not in the order they were taken.
7. Shoot it again if the seasons change or the house sits.

You will know it worked when your saves and your showing requests in the first 72 hours go up.

9. Ignoring the staging moves that are free

What it looks like. Blinds twisted open instead of pulled up. Furniture against every wall. A bedroom with a mattress and nothing else.

What it costs. Trisha Lee stages houses for a living and her episode is full of specifics that cost nothing. Her blinds point is the one that stuck with me: people turn the slats open but almost never pull the blinds all the way up, so the window is half covered in every photo and at every showing. She wants the full window and the full light.

She also wants the oversized furniture out so there is a walking path, and she does not want a couch shoved up against the window blocking the view that is supposed to be the feature. On the bedroom she is specific about what reads as a real bedroom: a headboard, two nightstands, two lamps. She does not even bother with a dresser, because that is not the shot that sells the room.

None of that is a staging invoice. It is an afternoon.

Do this instead.

1. Blinds all the way up, not just open, in every room, for photos and for every showing.
2. Remove enough furniture that there is a clear path through every room. When in doubt, take more out.
3. Pull furniture off the walls a few inches. It reads as larger, not smaller.
4. Every bedroom gets a headboard, two nightstands and two lamps, even if you have to borrow them.
5. Point the furniture at the feature. If the view is the selling point, do not block the window.
6. White bedding and white towels, because they photograph clean and they can be bleached.
7. Walk in the front door and look at exactly what a buyer sees in the first three seconds. Fix that first.

You will know it worked when feedback stops mentioning that rooms feel small.

10. No plan for the first weekend

What it looks like. It goes in the MLS on a Tuesday afternoon. Then everyone waits to see what happens.

What it costs. We built a whole segment on this on Coffee Talks, and the line that matters is that most listings die on the third weekend. The first 72 hours are when the listing hits every saved search and every portal alert at once. That audience never assembles again. If nothing is prepared to catch it, you have spent your only guaranteed burst of attention on a property with no open house scheduled and no social push ready.

The NAR numbers back up the urgency without any exaggeration. The median recently sold home was on the market four weeks, and 34 percent sold within one to two weeks. A third of all houses are effectively decided in the first fortnight.

Do this instead. Run the same 72 hours every time.

1. Go live Thursday evening so the listing lands in Friday morning buyer alerts.
2. Saturday is the open house. It is on the listing before the listing goes live.
3. Sunday is the social push, with the video you already shot during the photo session.
4. Monday morning you review signal, not feelings. Saves, showings booked, open house attendance, online views, and messages from buyer agents.
5. Tell the seller before launch exactly which numbers you will report Monday and what each one would mean.
6. If the signal is weak, you address it in week one, while you still have room, not in week four when a price cut looks like panic.

You will know it worked when you are having the price conversation on day four instead of day thirty.

11. Waiting for buyers to come to the listing

What it looks like. You put it on the MLS, it syndicates everywhere, and that is the marketing plan.

What it costs. Jordan Cohen is the number one agent at his brand worldwide, and the thing he does that most agents do not is simple: when he takes a listing, he goes and finds the buyers, and he tells the seller in the listing appointment exactly how he is going to do it. He knows which neighborhoods the buyers for this house currently live in, and he goes and tells those people the house exists.

Most agents say the house will be on all the sites and every agent will see it. That is a distribution plan, not a marketing plan, and every other agent competing for that listing is saying the same sentence.

Do this instead.

1. Before the appointment, write down who buys this specific house. Not "a family." The move-up buyer currently in the two-bedroom six blocks north.
2. Find where those people live now and work that area: mail, door knock, the building, the block.
3. Call every agent who has shown a comparable property in the last sixty days and tell them this is coming.
4. Call the agents who lost out on the last three similar sales in the neighborhood. Their buyer is still looking.
5. Tell the seller the plan as a list of specific actions with dates, in the listing presentation. This is what wins the listing.
6. Report on the plan weekly, by action, not by adjective.

You will know it worked when you win listings against agents who charge less than you do.

The client conversation

12. Skipping the buyer consultation

What it looks like. Somebody calls, says they want to see the place on Saturday, and you meet them at the place on Saturday.

What it costs. Sara DeWulf said it is amazing to her how many agents skip the buyer consultation, and that it is a requirement for her before anybody sees a house.

Sarah Maslowski gave the receipt, and it is the most useful admission in the whole library. "Every time I have short circuited the buyer consult and jumped straight into showing homes, those transactions have always gone to hell in a hand basket." When she went back and looked at the deals that fell apart, that was the common thread.

Think about what you are doing when you skip it. You are three houses in before you know their timeline, their financing, whether they have to sell first, who else is on the decision, and what they actually care about. Every one of those unknowns is a deal that dies at week six.

Do this instead.

1. No showings before the consultation. Make it a rule, not a preference, so you are not negotiating it every time.
2. Do it on video if you cannot do it in person. Sarah Maslowski does hers on Zoom or Google Meet, specifically because her buyers had watched her online and knew her while she knew nothing about them, and a phone call does not fix that imbalance.
3. Cover, in order: why they are moving and by when, who else decides, the financing and who the lender is, what happens if they do not find anything, and what they think this process looks like.
4. Explain your side: how you work, what you need from them, how fast things move in this market, and what an inspection amendment actually does to a contract.
5. Set the search criteria together and write them down, so that in week five you have something to point at when the criteria have quietly changed.
6. Send a written summary the same day. It becomes the reference document for the whole relationship.

You will know it worked when your buyers stop disappearing in week six.

13. Winging it because the client is a friend

What it looks like. It is your cousin, so you skip the listing presentation. You already know the house. You already know them.

What it costs. Rachel Adams Lee sold her own parents' house and did a full listing presentation for them anyway, sitting down at the table like a stranger. Her point was that people skip the sit-down precisely for the people they care about most, and then do a worse job because they figure they can wing it.

The presentation is not a sales pitch you graduate out of. It is the conversation where expectations get set, where the price gets justified with evidence, and where you both agree what each of you is responsible for. Skip it and the first disagreement has no foundation underneath it. Now you are having a hard conversation about money with somebody you have to see at Thanksgiving.

Do this instead.

1. Do the full presentation for friends and family. Same deck, same comps, same paperwork.
2. Say why out loud at the start: you want them to get the same service as anyone who pays you, and you do not want to be guessing with their money.
3. Put the price conversation on paper with them, even if you are certain you agree.
4. Be explicit about how you will handle a disagreement, before there is one.
5. Sign the same agreements. Handshake deals with people you love are how friendships end.

You will know it worked when you stop dreading the family closings.

14. Never asking how they want to be contacted

What it looks like. You call. They are a texter. You leave voicemails they will never listen to and you conclude they are unresponsive.

What it costs. Cathy LaMon has been doing this thirty years and she described asking every client at the start: do you want a phone call, would you rather have a text, is it okay to leave a voicemail, what hours work, when should I not bother you.

I called it the platinum rule on that episode, which is not my phrase, but it fits. The golden rule is to treat people the way you want to be treated. The platinum rule is to treat them the way they want to be treated, and the only way to know that is to ask.

This is thirty seconds of work. The cost of skipping it is a whole transaction of small friction, and a client who describes you afterward as hard to reach when you were calling constantly.

Do this instead.

1. Ask at the first meeting: call, text or email, and which one for urgent things.
2. Ask what hours are fine and what hours are not.
3. Ask whether voicemail is read, ignored or hated.
4. Ask who else should be copied. Spouses find out secondhand and it goes badly.
5. Write the answers in the contact record, not on a legal pad.
6. Then follow it, including the part where you do not call at nine at night because you are thinking about it.

You will know it worked when your response times feel faster to clients without you actually working more.

15. Taking the wish list at face value

What it looks like. They say three bedrooms, two baths, that neighborhood, under 600. You go find three bedrooms, two baths, that neighborhood, under 600.

What it costs. Lindsay Dreyer had a client downsizing into a condo who had told her this would be her last home, the one she ages in place in. They were discussing a building and Lindsay asked whether she realized it was a walk-up with no elevator. She did not. It was not on the wish list because it never occurred to her to put it there.

Lindsay's read on the industry was that we all assume every agent does this kind of digging, and most do not. The common version is to take the list, go find matches, and call that service.

The wish list is what the client knows to ask for. Your job is the part they do not know to ask for, which is where the value is and, not coincidentally, where the referral comes from.

Do this instead.

1. Ask what this home needs to do for them in five years, not what it needs to have today.
2. Ask what went wrong in the last place. Complaints are more honest than requirements.
3. Ask who will be living there in three years. Parents, kids coming back, a roommate leaving.
4. Ask about the parts of the building nobody lists: stairs, elevators, parking, laundry, noise, the board, the assessment history and what is coming.
5. Say the hard thing when you see it. Lindsay told her client the building was wrong, and the client was thrilled, because nobody else had thought about it.
6. Write down what you learn and check every showing against it, not just against the wish list.

You will know it worked when clients start saying you thought of something they had not.

16. Answering slowly, then blaming the lead

What it looks like. The inquiry comes in at 9:40. You see it at 2:15. By then they have talked to somebody else, and you decide portal leads are garbage.

What it costs. Cindy Raney named this as one of her biggest pet peeves: people who are not looking at email consistently and who do not respond quickly. Her standard is that if you are in a service business, being available is the job.

I am deliberately not quoting you the famous lead-response statistics here, because the ones everybody repeats do not survive a look at their sources, and this page does not run numbers it cannot stand behind. You do not need a statistic for this one. Think about what you do when you inquire about anything and nobody gets back to you.

Do this instead.

1. Decide your response standard and write it down. Under fifteen minutes during working hours is a real standard. "Quickly" is not.
2. Turn on notifications for the two channels leads actually arrive through, and turn off the forty that do not matter.
3. First contact is a call. If they do not pick up, text immediately and say you just called.
4. Have a first message ready so you are not composing under pressure.
5. Block the hours you cannot respond, and say so in your voicemail and your auto-reply, with when you will respond.
6. If you genuinely cannot cover the hours, that is a real business problem with real solutions: a partner, a team, a coverage agreement. It is not a lead quality problem.

You will know it worked when you stop describing leads as bad.

After the closing

17. Disappearing after the closing

What it looks like. The deal funds. You send a card. That is the last contact, forever.

What it costs. This is the single most expensive item on this page, and the numbers are not close.

NAR's 2026 Member Profile says the typical Realtor gets 28 percent of business from repeat clients and 22 percent from referrals from past clients. Half. For agents with 16 or more years in, repeat business by itself is about half their pipeline, which is most of the explanation for why experienced agents earn more. It is not that they got better at cold prospecting. They stopped starting over.

Then the client side. Ninety-one percent of buyers say they would use their agent again or recommend them. Sixty-two percent already have recommended them, within a year of buying. And 66 percent of sellers chose their agent by referral or because they had used them before.

So the client is willing, the business is there, and the agent left.

Gia Devenyi owned this on air, which I respect enormously. She closed deals early in her career and did not keep up with those clients, and she called it learning it the hard way. She now treats the people she closes as the bread and butter of her future business, which is what the data says they are.

Do this instead.

1. Every closed client goes into a database the same day, with the address, the closing date and the names of everyone in the household.
2. Put four touches a year on the calendar for each one, scheduled the day you close so it happens without a decision.
3. Make at least two of those touches about their house, not about you. What sold on their street, what it means for their value, whether their assessment looks right.
4. Call on the closing anniversary. Not a card. A call.
5. When you see a permit, a sale or a development near them, that is a reason to reach out that is actually about them.
6. Keep doing it after they say they are not moving. Especially then. The median owner now stays eleven years, an all-time high, so this is a long game and most of your competitors will quit it in year two.

You will know it worked when your repeat and referral percentage starts climbing toward the 28 and 22 that the typical agent already has.

18. Only calling when you want something

What it looks like. Every contact is an ask. Do you know anyone looking to buy or sell. Are you thinking about selling. How is the market treating you.

What it costs. Michael Thornton described what this trains people to do. If every call from you is a request, people learn to brace, and eventually they stop picking up. His phrase was that you train them to put the phone down.

He also flagged the specific dead question, which is leading with how is the market. It is the question agents ask because it is the only thing they can think of, and it signals that you are calling as a Realtor doing Realtor things, not as a person.

The version of this that hurts most is the agent who does item 17 correctly, stays in touch for three years, and makes every single touch a soft ask. That is worse than silence, because it spends the relationship without ever building it.

Do this instead.

1. Make the ratio explicit. Three contacts that give something for every one that asks for anything.
2. Build the giving contacts out of things they cannot get elsewhere: what sold on their block, what the assessment appeal window looks like, which contractor you would actually use.
3. Ban how is the market as an opener. Ask about the thing you know about them.
4. Invite them to things that are not about real estate.
5. When you do ask, ask once, clearly, and then stop. A clear ask once a year beats a hint every month.
6. Notice who you are avoiding because you feel like you have asked too much. That is the relationship that needs a purely social contact.

You will know it worked when past clients start picking up on the first ring.

19. Never actually asking for the referral

What it looks like. You do great work, you stay in touch, and you assume the referrals will come on their own.

What it costs. Sam Sawyer relayed an agent's own verdict on his episode and it is the bluntest line in the whole library: "dumbest thing I did was not ask for the last 19 years."

The data says the willingness is already there. Sixty-two percent of buyers have already recommended their agent within a year of closing, at a median of one recommendation each, and 91 percent say they would. So people are out there recommending you at a rate of about once. Asking is not manufacturing something from nothing. It is pointing an existing behavior somewhere.

The other half of that same conversation matters as much: you can absolutely be bad at asking. The version that annoys people is vague, constant and self-interested.

Do this instead.

1. Ask once, on purpose, at the right moment. The best moment is right after something goes well, not at closing when they are overwhelmed.
2. Do not ask who is buying or selling. That asks them to search a category their memory does not file. Ask who has complained to you lately about their place, their commute or their landlord.
3. Ask for a first name only, and promise to handle it from there so they never have to sell you.
4. Make it easy to say no in the same sentence. Either way is fine is what makes people answer.
5. Follow up with the referrer after you talk to the person, so they know it went well. That is what produces the second referral.
6. Thank them in a way that costs you something and does not look like a rebate.

You will know it worked when you get a second referral from the same person.

Where the business actually comes from

20. Buying leads before working the people who already know you

What it looks like. Business is slow, so you sign up for a lead product with a monthly draft.

What it costs. Rachel Adams Lee calls this the worst mistake of her career. "The worst mistake I made was paying for leads in the very beginning when I didn't have any money. And every month I was reminded of my bad choices because it was just drafting out of my account."

Julia Hurley makes the structural version of the argument. Agents believe more leads wins the race, and the honest answer is that more leads does not fix anything if the follow-up is not there. You are buying volume for a process that is already leaking.

Now put that next to how business is actually won. Sixty-six percent of sellers went with a referral or an agent they had used before. Five percent came from an agent's personal outreach, four percent from a website. You are renting the four percent channel while the 66 percent channel sits in your phone unattended.

Do this instead.

1. Before you spend anything, write down fifty people who already know you. Stop at fifty.
2. Work that list for thirty days properly, meaning individual messages about their situation, not a blast.
3. Track what happens. Conversations, appointments, referrals.
4. Only then decide whether you have a lead problem or a follow-up problem.
5. If you do buy leads, buy them after you can prove you work the free ones, and start with one month, not a year.
6. Know your number before you sign: what a lead costs, how many become clients for you specifically, and what that makes a client cost. If you cannot answer, you are not ready.

You will know it worked when you can say what a closed client costs you.

21. Quitting after two tries

What it looks like. You call, you text, you get nothing, you mark it dead.

What it costs. Greg Pekarsky's version of this is about knowing your own numbers. He talks about knowing that a given lead source takes a certain number of calls on average, so that when you are on the thirtieth call you know why you are making it. Without that number, the third unanswered call feels like proof that this person is not interested, and you quit right before the point where contact usually happens.

Eithan Davidov's framing is the one I repeat most. "Most people don't do the follow up," he said, and so "it's not crowded along the extra mile." The competition drops out on their own.

I am leaving the famous five-follow-ups statistic out of this on purpose. It gets repeated constantly and it does not hold up when you go looking for the study. The argument works without it.

Do this instead.

1. Every open lead gets a next date on the calendar. If it has no next date it is not a lead, it is a name.
2. Decide in advance how many attempts a source gets before you stop, and write it down.
3. Vary the channel. Call, then text, then email, then a different time of day.
4. Change the message each time. The same message four times is how you become noise.
5. Give a reason for each contact that is about them, not about your pipeline.
6. Have a real last message: tell them you are going to stop reaching out, and to call you when the time is right. It gets more responses than anything else in the sequence.
7. Move them to the long list instead of deleting them. Twelve months is not a long time in a business where people move every eleven years.

You will know it worked when you start closing people you had written off.

22. A database of fifty people

What it looks like. You say the CRM is overwhelming and you cannot keep up with the tasks. Then you open it and there are fifty contacts.

What it costs. Zach Geisendorfer described exactly this on his episode, agents telling him their CRM is so busy they can barely keep up, and then it turns out there are fifty people in it. The overwhelm is real, but it is not coming from volume. It is coming from having no system, so fifty feels like five hundred.

Chase Craig supplies the correction and his is the better advice for most agents. He says this is where most agents fail: they start with a big list and treat everybody equally, and you do not have time to treat a big list equally. You are far better off starting with a small list and treating those people like kings.

So the goal is not a giant database. The goal is a real one, worked at a depth you can actually sustain.

Do this instead.

1. Build the list off your phone, not out of your memory. Recent calls, texts, email contacts.
2. Include the people you think are irrelevant. Renters move. People who used another agent get disappointed.
3. Sort into three tiers: people who would take your call today, people who know you, and everyone else.
4. Treat the first tier like kings. Monthly, personal, specific.
5. Give tier two four touches a year. Tier three gets whatever is genuinely useful and scalable.
6. One system, not three. A notebook you use beats a CRM you do not.
7. Add every new person the day you meet them, with one line about where you met.

You will know it worked when you can name who you are calling tomorrow without thinking about it.

23. Keeping your job a secret from your own network

What it looks like. Somebody at a party asks what you do. You say you are a Realtor, they say that is nice, and the conversation moves on.

What it costs. Sheila Alston says answering "I'm a Realtor" is the worst thing you can say, and her reasoning is about categories: the moment you say it, you get filed in a box with every other agent they have met, and whatever they think of that box is now what they think of you.

Sarah Stone has the opposite behavior and it is worth copying exactly. Her rule is that she never leaves a social situation without the people there knowing she is a Realtor, and she is emphatic that this does not mean pitching. She is not asking where they live or whether they are selling in the next five years. She wants it registered in their peripheral vision, so that later they remember they played tennis with a woman who does this.

Brad Boeye adds the part that stings, which is that most agents never tell everyone they know even once that they are open for business.

Do this instead.

1. Stop answering with the job title. Answer with the problem you solve or a story from this week.
2. Have one true sentence ready about what you actually did recently. Specific beats impressive.
3. Make the goal registration, not conversion. They should remember what you do, not feel sold.
4. Once a year, tell everyone you know, plainly, that you are open for business and that you would be glad to help.
5. Do not ask at the party. Follow up later, one on one, if there is a reason.
6. If you are embarrassed about being an agent, deal with that directly, because it is showing.

You will know it worked when people in your life start sending you questions unprompted.

24. Sitting at the table at your own open house

What it looks like. You set up at the dining table with your laptop. People walk in, you say hi, they walk around, they leave.

What it costs. Cameron Buening used to walk into other agents' open houses to study them, and what he found is the indictment. "Nobody would greet me," he said, and "there was nothing I filled out for them to capture my information." The agent sat at a table. He walked through and left, and the agent had no idea who he was or that he had been there.

Every person through that door chose to spend part of their weekend inside a house for sale. That is the most qualified foot traffic you will ever get for free, and it is common to convert none of it.

Worth knowing what the door is actually worth: NAR says 3 percent of sellers found their agent by meeting them at an open house. Small, but it is larger than direct mail or yard signs, and it is the only one of the three where you are standing right there.

Do this instead.

1. Stand up and be near the door. Not at a table, not on your phone.
2. Greet everyone within five seconds, by introducing yourself, not by asking them to sign in.
3. Ask one question that is not a qualifier: what brought you in today.
4. Know three things about the house that are not in the listing, and one about the neighborhood. That is what makes you worth talking to.
5. Capture information because they want something, not because you asked them to sign. The list of what sold on this block in the last year, the assessment history, the floor plan.
6. Ask everyone, including the neighbors, whether they know anyone looking in the area.
7. Follow up within 24 hours with the thing you promised, and nothing else.

You will know it worked when you get one real conversation out of every open house instead of a sign-in sheet.

25. Farming everywhere except your own building

What it looks like. You buy a farm area across town. Meanwhile nobody in your own building knows what you do.

What it costs. This one is mine. I live in a new-construction building in Wicker Park and I have lived there since it opened. MRED, the Chicagoland MLS, serves more than 40,000 brokers and appraisers. In four years, not one of them has ever put a single piece of mail under my door or in my mailbox about my building.

Not one. And people move out of that building every year, because life happens, jobs transfer, the two-bedroom stops being big enough.

Now the honest part, because this page does not get to only use the numbers that flatter the argument. Direct mail is how 2 percent of sellers found their agent. It is not a powerful channel on its own. But that is exactly the point here. The cost of being the only agent farming a building you already live in is close to zero. You are not buying a list, you are not driving anywhere, and you already know the difference between the tiers and which line has the better views.

Do this instead.

1. Start with the building or the block you actually live on. You have information nobody else has.
2. Send something useful quarterly. What sold in the building, what it closed at, what it means for the tier they are on.
3. Be the person who knows the assessment history and what is coming. Owners care about this far more than they care about your headshot.
4. Go to the board meetings even if you do not join the board. That is where you hear who is thinking about leaving.
5. Use the amenities and actually talk to people. This is a relationship business run out of a gym and a mail room.
6. Give it two years and expect one transaction to pay for all of it.
7. Then add the building next door.

You will know it worked when someone in your building asks you what their place is worth.

Marketing that sounds like everybody else

26. A profile that does not say you sell real estate

What it looks like. Sunset cover photo. Kids in the profile picture. Nowhere on the page does it say what you do for a living.

What it costs. Courtney Hatfield put it as a question, and it is the right question. "When I go to your page, your Facebook page, your Instagram page, how do I know that you sell real estate?" A beautiful photo of your family is beautiful. It is not information.

Kim Rittberg sees the same thing from the coaching side. Agents come to her who are knowledgeable, hard working and smart, and then you go to their page and none of that shows.

Here is why it matters more than it sounds. Eighty percent of sellers only contact one agent. They are not evaluating you against competitors, they are trying to remember somebody. When they go looking, your profile is the confirmation step. If the page does not confirm it, the thought dies there.

Do this instead.

1. Put what you do and where you do it in the name field and the bio, in plain words. Chicago real estate, not "helping dreams come true."
2. Cover photo does one job: it says what you do. It can still be beautiful.
3. Pin one post that shows a recent transaction or a genuinely useful local thing.
4. Make the contact method obvious and make sure it works. Call the number yourself.
5. Say the neighborhoods by name. That is what people search and what they remember.
6. Check it on a phone, logged out, the way a stranger sees it.

You will know it worked when people who have known you for years say they did not realize you did this.

27. Posting nothing but just listed, just sold and awards

What it looks like. Your whole feed is listing graphics, sold graphics and a plaque.

What it costs. Rachel Adams Lee has the clearest rule I have heard on this. Eighty percent of what you post should be who you are, what you are doing, what you are reading, why somebody would want to hang out with you on a weekend. Twenty percent is real estate. Her reasoning: "people might find you because you're in real estate, but they stick around because of who you are and how you make them feel."

The all-listings feed fails on its own terms. It is a billboard for an audience that is not in the market this month, which is almost all of them. The median owner stays eleven years. If your only content is transactional, you are invisible for a decade and then you hope to be remembered.

Do this instead.

1. Move toward 80 percent personal and local, 20 percent transactional. If that feels uncomfortable, start at 60/40.
2. Post the neighborhood, not just the property. The new place that opened, the construction on the corner, why that block is priced differently than the one behind it.
3. When you do post a sale, post the story and the decision, not the graphic. What the problem was and how it got solved.
4. Show your face regularly. People hire a person.
5. Keep politics and religion off the business account. Courtney Hatfield's position on this was simple: we are not in the market to debate, and she is not going to lose a client over who they voted for.
6. Answer the questions you actually get asked all day. Those are the posts that travel.

You will know it worked when people comment about something other than the house.

28. Opening a video with your own name

What it looks like. "Hey guys, my name is [name] and today I want to talk about..."

What it costs. Rachel Adams Lee acts this one out on the episode and it is funny because it is exact. "They'll be like, hey guys, my name's Rachel and today, gone. Lost him." Her point is that you have one second, and you spent it on the least interesting information available, which is your name.

Nobody scrolling has agreed to care who you are yet. They will care after you have said something worth hearing. The introduction is a thing you earn a few seconds in, not the toll you charge up front.

One local note, because it has bitten us. Captions are generated from audio, so the hook has to be spoken out loud, not just laid on the screen as text. A great on-screen hook over a spoken "hey guys" is still a lost viewer.

Do this instead.

1. First spoken line is the most interesting sentence you have. Say it out loud before you introduce anything.
2. Lead with the problem or the surprise. "This building's assessments went up 40 percent and nobody who lives there knows why."
3. Introduce yourself later, briefly, or not at all.
4. Cut the first three seconds of the recording. Almost always an improvement.
5. Make the hook spoken, not just on screen.
6. Say one thing per video. Two ideas is two videos.

You will know it worked when your average view duration goes up.

29. Five platforms at twenty percent each

What it looks like. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, all half-done, all posting the same reposted graphic.

What it costs. Levi Lascsak picked one platform deliberately, and his reasoning is the cleanest statement of the problem I have heard: "you're going to put a 20% effort into five different platforms and you'll never truly master one." You never really generate business from any of them, because you are dabbling.

Michael B. Bell generalizes it past social. Do three things and do them really well, and do not feel like you have to do ten, because you spread yourself too thin and the consumer figures that out fast.

The hidden cost is not the wasted hours. It is that you never find out whether any of it works. Five half-efforts produce five ambiguous results, so you conclude that content does not work, when what did not work is dabbling.

Do this instead.

1. Pick one platform for six months. Pick it based on where the people you want are, not where you like being.
2. Define what winning looks like before you start, in conversations, not in views.
3. Post at a frequency you can hold on your worst week, not your best one.
4. Repurpose to the others only after the first one works, and only if it costs you almost nothing.
5. Give it six months before judging. Sarah Maslowski's point about this is that agents keep restarting, and the agent down the street who started six months ago with a shaky camera and imperfect audio already has a deal pending.
6. Do not wait for better gear. Waiting is the actual mistake.

You will know it worked when you can name the business that came from one channel.

Running it like a business

30. Running personal and business money through one account

What it looks like. One checking account. The commission lands, the mortgage comes out, the Instacart order comes out, and at tax time you go through a year of statements with a highlighter.

What it costs. Shahar Plinner works with real estate agents on exactly this. "The number one mistake that we see real estate agents are making is co-mingling of funds." He gave two consequences and they are both worse than the bookkeeping annoyance.

The first is that you cannot see your own business. You do not know whether you are profitable, what you actually spend on, or what your real net is, which means every financial decision you make is made on bad data. The second is the IRS. Commingled accounts are what gets pulled apart in an examination, transaction by transaction.

The scale of what is being decided here is bigger than most agents think. NAR's 2026 Member Profile puts the typical Realtor's median gross income at $59,200 and median business expenses at $9,530. If you do not know which of your spending is which, you are guessing at a number that large.

Do this instead.

1. Open a separate business checking account this week. It takes an afternoon.
2. Every commission goes in there. Every business expense comes out of there. No exceptions, ever, including the small ones.
3. Pay yourself by transferring to your personal account on a schedule, so you can see what the business actually earns.
4. Get a separate card for business spending so the categorization happens by itself.
5. Set aside tax money the day each commission lands, into a third account you do not touch.
6. Talk to a CPA who works with commission earners about whether an LLC or an S corp election makes sense for you. Shahar makes an argument on the show about a threshold where this starts paying off. I am not your accountant and neither is he, so treat that as the prompt for a conversation, not as advice you act on from a web page.

You will know it worked when you can say what you made last quarter without opening anything.

Do this today

Thirty is a lot. If you only do three things this week, do these, because they are the three with the most money behind them.

1. Write down every client you have closed and put four dates a year on the calendar for each one. This is item 17, and it is half the typical agent's business. Do it today, before you read anything else. 2. Call the listing agent on your next offer, within five minutes of sending it. Item 1. It costs you two minutes and four different top producers say almost nobody does it. 3. Ask one past client the complainer question. Item 19. Not who is buying or selling. Who has complained to you lately about their place.

The short version

Most of this list is not about talent. Almost every item is a small piece of work that is easy to skip, that nobody will ever call you out for skipping, and that quietly moves business away from you over years.

The reason the list is worth working through is in the data. Half of the typical agent's business already comes from people who know them. Eighty percent of sellers only talk to one agent. Ninety one percent of buyers would recommend the agent they used, and most of them will never be asked.

You do not have to be better than everybody. You have to be the one who called.

Frequently asked questions

Recognize more than three of these? Book 10 minutes with D.J. I'll call you, and I won't bring up Kale unless you do.

Sources

• National Association of Realtors, 2026 Member Profile: repeat business, referrals from past clients, income, experience, transaction sides, business expenses.
• National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers: how sellers and buyers found their agent (Exhibit 7-2), sellers contacting only one agent (p. 98), would use again or recommend (Exhibits 4-11, 4-12), weeks on market (Exhibit 6-20), agent usage and FSBO share, median tenure.
• Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) on its own subscriber scale.
• Keeping It Real Podcast, episodes cited by guest and date throughout. 535 episodes, November 2022 through September 2026.