Real estate agents should build a contact database by adding people daily with minimal fields: first name, last name, email, cell phone. Import your existing phone contacts and prioritize text marketing over direct mail. A spreadsheet works to start, but a CRM scales better.
Every day you should be looking for people to add into your database. You could run this off of honestly a Google spreadsheet like a Google sheet, first name, last name, street address, city, state, zip, cell phone, email address. Really all you need is you know when you think about it because we're not going to do direct mail in this low cost or no cost lead gen levers. Really all you need is first name, last name, email address and cell phone. You will want to use text marketing. Quite simply it's anyone that knows, likes or trust. So it's like the painful work of going into your cell phone, going into all of your contacts and bringing those contacts into this spreadsheet or into your CRM. You want to be able to systematically scale or sustainably, predictably scale. You'll need a CRM so little bit of money to spend there but you could also run this just out of a spreadsheet.
