Almost every real estate agent will consider cold calling in their career. They may not like it when people cold call them but part of them is intrigued by the idea of picking up the phone, making a few calls and landing a listing presentation. Cold calling is a perfectly acceptable form of lead generation in real estate, but you need to understand that trade offs. If your cold calling is coming at the expense of your database marketing, then you are making a mistake. Cold calling is a huge time investment and, in our opinion, there are better ways to generate leads in real estate. That said, it can be used in tandem with geo farming.
In this real estate agent training podcast, you will find out about cold calling in real estate.
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School. The podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome back to Rev Real Estate School. I'm your host Michael Montgomery. Today we're talking about cold calling is cold calling dead? Is it something that you should focus on in your real estate business? And if you do plan on focusing on cold calling what can you do to improve your chances of success.
[00:00:32] First off what do I mean by cold calling. There is some confusion out there as to what actually constitutes cold calling for the sake of this podcast. We are talking about having a number of from somebody who has not ever given you that number whether that be they've never signed up on your website they've never filled out contact information on your website or anything like that. You have a list of people usually a list of people that live within a certain geographical area and you are just going down the list and calling them.
[00:01:03] These are people that have shown no interest whatsoever in real estate. So is it worth your time. The big question in 9 out of 10 cases I would say no that's not to say that there aren't people out there that are having great success through cold calling it can definitely work. But at what cost and the costs that I mean is time? So if you have say two hours a day to prospect Your time is so much better spent spending that time talking to your database growing your database even going out for lunch with a client or a past client or a friend and talking real estate and talking about life then you'd be spent sitting on the phone and calling people that are not expecting your call personally.
[00:01:46] Part of how I decide whether I want to go with a certain marketing structure campaign is I think this isn't the only thing but I think is it something that I would like. So do I get cold called. Yes we all do as real estate agents our numbers are out there. It's easy for people to get a hold of us. So we do get cold calls and I have a question for you. How does that make you feel when somebody cold calls you selling you a product? How does that make you feel? Are you excited to then talk to that person and engage in a conversation and potentially buy their product? Most times no. So again, I'm using words like most and maybe in that sort of thing but in almost all cases the answer is "No." So that person on the other line. It's a strategy and it's a strategy that can take a lot of time and can work but your time is so much better spent doing other things. The reason why it may seem appealing is because you just have a list of paper with a bunch of phone numbers and that seems a lot easier just going through that list of paper and calling those people than it is to build relationships and build meaningful relationships with people in your community.
[00:02:53] In many ways we're addicted to new we just want new contacts new phone numbers we want that easy list of people to work through. Now cold calling is not an easy thing to do. If you've ever done it it's very rejection heavy work. But the concept of just having a list of phone numbers really draws on that fact that we just want new and we want more contacts. Now with all of that is there a time where you can do some cold calling. Is there a time where it can be productive and yes there is but the first thing that I would lead with is that if you already have other streams of business if you're focused on your database and social media and some other streams of business you don't necessarily need to add cold calling.
[00:03:33] Where cold calling can work is if it's used in tandem with geo farming. So if you're doing circle prospecting so potentially you set a listing in a community and then you pull the phone records to call people in that area that you sold that listing. Now an important part of this is yes you will get rejected. You also have to treat this as rejection practice so it can be positive on that front especially if you're a little bit more timid when it comes to rejection as a lot of people are when they get into real estate and even as they grow in their career. This is a challenging concept. So if you just want to build up some thicker skin. Cold calling is a great way to do that. Also we have to understand that we are interrupting people so we really have to come from a place of keeping the conversation relatively short and being very genuine. If we're actually calling with the intention of trying to solicit a listing or a buyer and that's our mindset it will not go as well. But if you're coming from a place of I just want to let you know that one soul down the street from you and this is what it went for. Is there anything I can help you with today. If you're coming from more of that mindset chances are the conversation can go a lot better.
[00:04:44] The other thing about cold calling is if you're going to do it understand it's a numbers game so it's not about just making one call you're going to have to sit down and make a ton of calls and deal with that rejection and deal with certain people that are hanging up. And that's one thing which can be great because we do have to build our thick skin. But if you're just randomly calling your city I'd highly recommend avoiding doing that if you're randomly calling your city and just asking if they're looking to by herself they know anybody who's looking to buy or sell. The chances of that actually turning into business. It can happen but it's so slim your time is so much better spent meeting people instead of spending an hour cold calling a random community spend an hour calling three past clients or three friends or going out for lunch with somebody that you know in your community and just talking about their life. Naturally you will get so much more business from this. It will be more enjoyable business and it will be more productive time.
[00:05:42] Now two other caveats to this is if you're calling a first sale by owners or your calling expired listings that can be a very good use your time especially if you're structured with how you go about doing that. But it should always come from a place of how can we add these people into our database. Same thing with geo farming. If you're doing anything related to cold calling with geo farming our first sale by owners or expires or even if you just do random cold calling which I don't necessarily recommend. But if you do then it should always be coming from a place of how we can add these people into our database and then from there we can start nurturing the relationship. It just moves all the way back full circle back into how we can continue to build relationships with people. There's 100 different ways that we can go about doing it. Cold calling is lower on the list for me because of the time required that you need to put into this in order to be successful. But there's many different ways that you can get to a successful business in real estate.
[00:06:43] Thank you so much for listening this episode. You can reach out to me anytime at revrealestateschool.com Or you can find me on Instagram at the.michael.montgomery. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you in the next lesson.
[00:06:56] This episode of Rev Real Estate School has come to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back here for the next lesson.
