Is Cold Calling DEAD for Realtors in 2025?

Is cold calling dead? In 2025, I sold a lot of homes without cold calling. So does cold calling work? I'll get it out of the way. Yes, it does work. It is soul sucking in my opinion. And 5,000 plus families served in my journey in real estate sales helped a couple thousand, maybe even close to 3,000 agents at this point grow and scale their businesses pre predominantly without cold calling. So none of what we teach a million dollar agent method is based on any cold calling, any paid leads, any referral fees at closing, any of that stuff.

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you. The good, bad and ugly of building a high lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results.

You just gotta do the work. All of our stuff is generating warm, inbound organic leads. And my philosophy is this and I'm gonna go through kind of six thoughts I have here that hopefully will convince you that there's a better way than cold calling. My philosophy is that if I'm gonna put effort into my business, it's going to be put into something that allows me to scale. And scaling is different than growing. So could you grow your real estate sales by getting good enough cold calling where you can set listing appointments, go on those listing appointments, take those listings, rinse and repeat, Right? Yes, you can. Absolutely. There are entire coaching programs based on this fact. Quick story, and this is no disrespect to the OG Mike Ferry. Here's a funny story. When I first got into coaching, so I ran a webinar. This was my first webinar like and I think the title was how I sold 300, how I closed 312 homes working one day a week. And it was the year. So the year I did that was 2013 and I just got into real estate. My first full year was 2008. So by 2013, five years into the business, I was down to working one day a week. And that next year we went from 312 to 453 and I was still working one day a week, 10 producing agents. So obviously I went down the path of leverage. I built out lead generation levers that brought in leads consistently. So this was not a bunch of agents cold calling. None of it was based on cold calling. I send out this invitation to a webinar. Come find out on this webinar how I sold 312 homes working one day per week. Mike Ferry gets a hold of this email, turns it around. I guess he like cut and paste the email, like, as an image into an email that he sent out to his. His list. And apparently it went to thousands of agents because they all, not all of them, but a lot of them reached out to me and say, hey, listen, just so you know, got that email from you also got it from Mike Ferry. So he basically said, if you believe that this is possible, if you believe that somebody can build a business to sell hundreds of homes per year working one day a week, I have some, like, land to sell you in, some. Some swamp land in Florida or some. Funny comment, right? So his worldview is such that the only way to succeed in real estate is to cold call. Like, his whole program is based on that. Does it work? 100% it works. Do I know agents that sold over 100 homes per year cold calling? Yes. Are those agents a slave to their business, decades into their business? Yes. So I knew when I saw that path because I kind of evaluated the different ways I wanted to build my business. When I saw cold calling as a way to do business, I actually tried it once. And I remember I talked to one expired and he was just ugly. And I was like, there's no way. I don't know if he hung up with me or said some mean words or, you know, maybe my. My skin is not that thick. And if you're a cold caller, you can argue that, you know, I'm just a wimp or whatever. But I knew that I wanted to detach the time I put into my business from the money that I made. And so a true business owner is not tied into their business. And I didn't know if what I wanted to build was possible, if I was going to be the. The only one that could generate opportunity in my business via cold calling, I knew that it wasn't possible for me to scale. And because now I've seen teams that have tried to scale beyond, like the rainmaker, the primary cold caller trying to teach others. And it's very hard to replicate that skill set. Right. You could have like 15, 20, 30,000 calls in, and the level of skill, you can get lethal on the phone. But I didn't want to do that. Like, I just, I knew I didn't want to do that. So my only option was to build marketing systems, we call them lead gen levers now that generate inbound organic opportunities. Right? So here are the reasons, six of them, why cold calling is dead, according to me, in 2025 and beyond. And, and I just think it's something that if you want to have a business that truly serves you, truly gives you a life of freedom, and helps you make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time, these are the six reasons. So first of all, it's a low conversion rate. We've got a cold caller that I know. He actually came into our world. He's a cold caller and we're trying to teach him this, you know, inbound organic and building marketing systems. And he's like used to cold calling for like six to seven hours a day to set one listing appointment. He's like, yeah, it's totally fine. I just cold call for six to seven hours a day. I get all the rejection and I just book my one listing appointment. Sometimes I can get it in four or five hours, sometimes it takes me six or seven hours. But somewhere in there and I'm just like, that sounds awful, right? So it's, it's maybe 1 2% of the conversations you'll have on a cold call situation. You'll, you'll book into either a nurture or a listing appointment. So does it work? Yeah, it works. But also door knocking works. And who wants to door knock? Like, I don't want a door knock. Does it work? Yeah, it works, but I don't want it. Like it was 27 degrees today in Charlotte, North Carolina. You know, I don't want to be out in 27 degrees or if it's raining. Like, what, you don't do business if you're a door knocker. Like, you're not going to. You know what I mean? So, so those methods are just not anything that is viable in my opinion. So number one, low conversion rate. Number two, who really likes a cold caller? Like, raise your hand and there are a few of you out there that are just sort of weird. And I'll do this from time to time. Very rarely though, you'll kind of get a cold call and you'll, you'll have a conversation, conversation with them and sort of push them a little bit. But consumers hate cold callers. So why would you want to do something that people don't like anyway? You know, even if you were like resilient and you're thick skinned and like, I'm gonna do it, it's gonna be fine. There's nobody that like gets a cold call. Oh man, my home did expire and oh, you're the, you're. You're the 17th agent. Let me entertain this conversation with you. Right. Why would you want to put yourself in a position where the person on the other side is not gonna have an affinity towards you. They're just not gonna like the whole situation. So that's just another thing. Number three, it's not a great first impression. How do you generate business for. For as a real estate agent, I call complete strangers. I don't know how to market at all. So the only thing I know how to do is put a headset on and I just call complete strangers. We have this expression, you know, a blood and guts approach to business or more elegance and ease. I just choose. Not that my ways are easier because in a lot of ways they're harder to build the systems and slow down and do that work. But the blood and guts like this, I just think it's a horrible first impression. It's like you get into someone's house and like, you know, you met them just like banging the phone over the head via a cold call and it's like, well, how do you market my home? It's like, clearly you don't know how to market yourself because you're cold calling. If you were a good marketer, you wouldn't have to cold call people. So I just think it's a bad first impression. Number four, there's way better and this is where my brain goes. I just think there's way better things to spend your time on. And that's what Million Dollar Agent method. If there is a plug ever. If there was a plug for Million Dollar Agent method, it's on this one point. Time is better spent on building scalable marketing systems. Right? Whether it's our database touch blueprint or our brand authority builder or we've got eight or nine other lead gen levers that take some work to implement. But leads are coming to you, right? For sale by owners. Yeah. Do we have a for sale by owner system? Yes, but they call us or we follow up with them because we provided some valuable bit of information. Same thing with our expired direct response system. Do we work expires? Yes, we work expires but they call us because we mailed them something. Is there more effort involved? Yes, but it's a 20x return on investment and it takes some time to set up. But you can outsource it to an administrator or high school kid to do your mailers, right? So I just think there's time better spent on a whole bunch of systems build outs, you know, building out systems versus just picking up the phone and cold calling number five. Your time is worth more than rejection. So just because you could grin and bear it and smile and dial, why would you, if you are a cold caller and this rubs you the wrong way, but don't you think you are worth more than just getting rejected all day long? But yeah, but the numbers, you know, I know that I've gotten good enough at it where I can see this one liner and you know, I can basically get through, you know, X number. I started out as this and like, okay, great, but your time is worth more. There are way more efficient ways to generate business and there's got to be better things that you can spend your time on than just getting rejected all day long, right? Three, four, five hours of cold calling and getting rejected to find that one or two that are going to allow you to come and present to them. That's number five. Number six is once you figure out the inbound lead generation, you know, building out those systems, they convert at a massively, massively higher rate. Like 4 to 5 times higher conversion rates. Well, way more than that. I mean these are like people that are in your network, you're expanding. Basically. There are people that either know you or don't know you. The goal in our world is to generate inbound leads, organic inbound leads that go into your now they're sort of in your world and you're just following up with them with valuable information and they're raising their hands when they're ready. Right. That's our lead generation lead conversion system build out. And we do that within 90 days at million Dollar Agent Method. And if there's a bonus one on number seven is that cold calling is not scalable. Right? So there's no way that you could scale cold calling. What are you going to do it for five years to get good enough at it and then teach another way, less motivated agent how to do it? Like there's no way. It doesn't work. It does not scale. But you spend 90 days building out systems in Million Dollar Agent Method. Com. Go check out the seven minute video. You spend 90 days building out systems. You have what it takes to generate 1, 2, 3 closings per month without cold calling. Right? So cold calling works for all you cold callers. Go to Million Dollar Agent method dot com. Suspend disbelief. There is an easier way to do this, but I'm living proof that you do not to be. You do not need to be a cold caller. And the only true way to scale your business sustainably without it relying 100% on your efforts is to figure out a way to build lead generation systems that do the heavy lifting for you. If that is you and you want to figure out how to build out those systems together, go to million dollar agentmethod.com but we'll see you in the next training. Be good. Bye Bye.