Referrals Are Your Best Leads. You Just Can't Schedule Them.

Many buyers select their agent long before making that initial phone call. According to Zillow's 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report for Agents, 47% of buyers and 59% of sellers hire the first agent they contact. Zillow notes that this choice is frequently finalized prior to contact, driven primarily by an agent's online presence.

So winning clients is a marketing problem before it is a sales problem. I came at this from the marketing side first. In 2009, I launched The Hotel Inventory to help owners market hotels they wanted to sell, and that business grew into AQQIRE, a commercial real estate listing and marketing platform where I am still COO.

Most of the work is still done through word of mouth. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) asks buyers and sellers how they chose their agent, and in its 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 43% of buyers said they were referred, while another 18% returned to an agent they had used before. Sellers rely on it even more. 66% were referred to the agent or had a prior relationship with them, and 35% cited the agent's reputation as a deciding factor in hiring them.

I am not arguing for fewer referrals. The trouble is that a past client mentions your name when they happen to, at a barbecue or in a group chat, and often three weeks after you needed the business. You cannot hire a new agent against that, and you cannot fix a slow quarter with it.

The second channel is growing. According to the same NAR report, 52% of buyers found the home they purchased online. Zillow found that 36% of sellers now find their agent online, up from 15% in 2018, and that 33% of buyers said online research played a key role in choosing theirs.

The form that came in at 11 p.m.

One of your agents is working a lead this afternoon who filled out a form at 11 p.m. on Sunday. He liked the kitchen. He is renting until his lease ends next winter, maybe the one after that. She will call him twice, text him a few comps, and set a reminder to follow up in the spring.

She is doing that because January was full of calls from past clients, June has been silent, and there is nothing else in front of her. Give her four of those afternoons and a week is gone. It never lands in the pipeline report. From the outside, she looks busy.

What changed for one of our clients

We placed Mic, a marketing specialist, with a real estate client managing a large number of properties. When she joined, their marketing relied mainly on referrals and organic search. Paid digital advertising was limited, social media activity was irregular, and there was no system for generating leads or nurturing the ones that came in.

She developed a program that ran on targeted social media advertising, content marketing, and search engine optimization. Inbound lead volume increased in the quarters following launch, and as she adjusted the ads based on performance data, the cost per lead decreased.

The part I would recommend to other brokerages is also the least exciting. Mic established lead scoring criteria so the sales team knew which leads to call first. Without criteria like those, more leads only means more calls. With them, a greater share of inbound leads became qualified opportunities. The sales team credited their higher conversion rates to improved lead quality and to spending less time on prospects who were not ready and more on those who were. Mic's full case study is here.

That is what we do at eFlex. A marketing salary is hard to sign off on when the leads that would justify it do not exist yet, so the work slides to whoever has a free hour, usually an agent between showings. Hiring for the role offshore changes the scale of that decision, and you can judge the channel by the leads it generates.

Three things to check in your own pipeline

Look at your most recent 20 closed deals. If nearly all of them came through referrals or past clients, your reputation is strong. You also have no lever to pull when a quarter goes quiet.

Take one online inquiry and follow it through its first day. Pull one from last week that never turned into anything. Look at the timestamp on the form, then at the first call or email that went out to that person. If those are more than a few hours apart, they had already spoken to somebody else by the time you reached them. That is what Zillow's 47% costs you in practice.

Ask two of your agents how they identify a ready buyer before the first conversation. If they cannot say, ask what the last buyer who closed quickly had in common with the one before that. It typically comes down to things anyone can verify: a pre-approval letter, a lease ending in the spring, or a particular neighborhood they keep asking about. Write those down, and you have the beginning of a scoring system.

Referrals will keep arriving. The goal is a second source you can plan around, so that a slow referral month does not have to mean a slow month for your team.

eFlexervices places dedicated offshore marketing and lead generation staff with US real estate teams. If one of the checks above turned up a gap, we are glad to talk through what that seat would look like for you.

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