As someone who HATED cold calling, I interviewed some real estate agents and investors who are experts at real estate cold calling. This post shares their secrets and how all three Realtors have closed at least 24 transactions from cold calling within a 6-month period.
Drew Mathison – Licensed since 2019, closed 28 transactions in his first 6 months
Christopher Schultz – Licensed since 2020, as of May 2023 had 29 closings @ $8M in volume for 2023
Greg McDaniel – Licensed Realtor for 24 years. Although he won’t share his numbers, I’m willing to bet he’s made over 1,000,000 cold calls and $10,000,000 in GCI from cold calling. He is the subject matter expert. He also hosts an awesome podcast called Real Estate Uncensored.
By reading this, you will have all of the information necessary to generate leads daily via cold calling.
Table of Contents:
What is Real Estate Cold Calling?
Real estate cold calling is the practice of contacting individuals who you have never met by phone call and could potentially sell, or buy a house. Generally speaking, cold calling is done to acquire listings versus buyer leads.
The reason most cold calls target listings is property owner info is public information. You can pull a list of an entire neighborhood of addresses and who owns those properties. From there, depending on your source of that data, all you need to do is find the phone numbers or start dialing.
Real Estate Cold Calling Scripts
We all have cell phones now and could dial numbers at will… But you’re probably thinking ‘What would I say when they answer?’ That’s what cold-calling scripts are for. Cold-calling scripts are guidelines for how a conversation should start and flow. Once a conversation is started, the flow is all very similar.
1. Basic Cold Calling Script
This can be used for calling a huge list of homeowners with no specific filter.
As the expert, Greg McDaniel told me, “Most people overcomplicate it. 97% of people don’t want to be called, just like you wouldn’t want to be called. When someone answers the phone, say:
‘Good morning, this is {Your name} with {your brokerage}, I was wondering if you had any interest in selling your home at {address}?’
If they say no, regardless of how nasty they say it, leave on a positive note by saying:
‘Thank you for your time, you’ve been lovely to me. Have a wonderful day. Buh bye’
2. FSBO and Expired Listings Scripts for Real Estate Agents
For sale by owner and expired listings are amazing leads because they recently wanted to sell or want to sell right now. These leads generally convert much higher than targeting a whole neighborhood.
Christopher Schultz takes a much different approach than I’ve ever heard and I love his approach. Here is the script he uses for FSBO and Expired Listings:
“Hey is this {Seller Name}?”
Seller – “Yes?”
“Hey, this is Chris. I’m a local Realtor in the area. This is a cold call so feel free to hang up at any time. I was wondering if you had time for a quick question?”
WAIT FOR A RESPONSE FROM THE SELLER.
“That property on {address}. Whatever happened to that?”
And then the conversation gets started!
3. FSBO and Expired Listings Scripts for Investor Agents
Drew Mathison is an absolute stud hybrid investor/agent in the Greensboro and Southern Pines, NC market. Here is Drew Mathison’s script for FSBO and expired listing leads:
“Hey I was calling about the house listed for sale at {address}, is this the owner?”
They respond
“Awesome! My name is Drew with Boro Realty Group. I was reaching out because I’m actually interested in purchasing that home. I was curious if you could tell me more about it. It looks like it needs a bit of work.”
From there he asks questions about the property and their situation and probes at pain points. Then he goes to set the appointment by saying:
“Well hey, I actually have multiple options that might be helpful for you. One, I can help you renovate that property and get it listed, or two, I can give you a direct offer. What I’d love to do is come by tomorrow at 2 o’clock if you’re available or I also have 4:30. What would be best?”
I personally love this because he offers them multiple exit strategies which means his conversion rates at the appointment should be the highest possible.
4. Circle Prospecting Script for ‘Just Pending Listings’
Greg’s ‘Just Pending Circle Prospecting script’ is so smooth, it made me want to start dialing. Here is the process he uses:
Go into your MLS and sort by houses that have pended with the lowest amount of days on the market, and the highest possible list price.
Call the listing agent and ask how many offers they got on the house. Note: Some MLS’s will show how many offers a listing received.
Go into RedX’s platform and use their geo-circle prospecting tool. Pull a 300-home radius around the property that just pended. For there he starts dialing and here is his script:
“Hey, my name is Greg with ABC Realty here in town. Just wanted to let you know your neighbor over at {address that just pended} just went pending last night and they had 3 offers. That means there are 2 other families actively offering in your area and I was wondering if you might want to take advantage of the prices?”
He does advise you to choose your words carefully. Don’t act like you’re the listing agent selling the other property. I absolutely love this and think it’s the best of the cold calling strategies.
You can also use this framework of a script for ‘recently sold’ and ‘coming soons’ and even letting the community know about open houses!
Try it out and let me know how it goes via Instagram DM.
Cold Calling Lists
A cold calling list is a list of property owners that meet certain criteria. Maybe that criteria is just ‘owns a property’, it is still someone you can call to see if they’re interested in selling.
Individually pulling property owner data can be extremely time-consuming. Fortunately, there are a ton of services and software out there that pull the info for you. Most times it’s included in your MLS fees.
Where to find Cold Calling Lists for Real Estate Agents
Lists can come from all over the place. Here is where I would recommend obtaining data from manually for the freshest data:
- Generic homeowner data: Your local GIS or MLS
Example: Charlotte NC GIS
- PreForeclosures: Your local courthouse
- FSBO and FRBO: Zillow, Craigslist, Facebook
- Expired Listings: Your MLS
The simplest way to do it is by using one of the many real estate cold-calling software like REDX or Vulcan 7. These are specifically designed for real estate agents who want to target FSBO, Expired Listings, FRBO, and circle prospecting.
A benefit of using the above platforms is they come with phone numbers so you don’t need to find them.
How to get phone numbers for real estate cold calling
Here are several ways to get phone numbers for real estate cold calling:
Google the property address and use:
Been Verified
Spokeo
Skiptracing software for large lists such as:
- Launch Control (I used them when I was doing an SMS campaign for discounted deals)
CAUTION: Some states are becoming more and more aggressive than the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Please know your state and the local rules & regulations so you don’t get sued for thousands, or millions of dollars.
Real Estate Cold Calling Objections and Rebuttals
The goal of a cold call is to find people who are considering selling their house and set an appointment with them, but this is also a great time to identify obstacles and future objections. The four main objections or obstacles are:
Price
Relationships
Time
Risk
Price Objections and Rebuttals
I see other blog posts about objections and rebuttals talking about price being the main objection.
Price should not come up until you see the property. Don’t even bring it up until you see the condition of the property. If for some reason you need to bring up price, tell them something along the lines of “Well it looks like Zillow says your home is worth around $450,000. Would you agree with that?”
If it’s different than what they want, you can blame the software and let them know you can’t properly price their property without seeing it in person.
Relationships
This is the number one deal killer in the real estate industry. Other people who you had no idea were decision makers.
Let’s say you run a listing appointment and accurately assess and price a property. It seems like the seller is on board and excited then one day, you get a text and they say, “Hey, after thinking about it, I don’t think now is a good time to sell.”
This is a 180 degree pivot and clearly something changed. You ask to hop on a call to see what happened.
When you call the seller, you find out their father actually used to be a real estate agent and he said right now is a really bad time to sell.
If you want to avoid these objections before they come up, I suggest asking this question after the appointment is scheduled: “Hey, I’ve gotten a few people in trouble in the past. Chuckle*. To prevent you from getting in trouble, let’s say everything works at the appointment and you’re excited to get started with the process. Is there anyone that would be upset with you for not speaking to them first?”
Sometimes there is no way around a father’s advice… But a great rebuttal starts by digging into WHY that objection exists from the father. ‘What about right now makes your father think it’s a bad time to sell?’
Once you identify and dismiss that concern, bring up all the pain they were going through, recreating the gap between what they have, and what they want. Make sure they feel the pain of what they explained to you.
Then ask ‘does your father know about {insert pain point} and how much it means to you?’ Then you can ask ‘if he did know about {insert pain point}, would he still tell you to do the same thing?’
Hopefully, that gets the wheels turning again!
Time Objection
Unless something is happening at a specific date, like children graduating and going to college, time shouldn’t really be an issue. It’s an easy excuse for another obstacle. This is usually overcome by giving them a hypothetical question such as,
‘If we found you a buyer right now that would be willing to purchase your property for {insert reasonable price} and give you up to 3 months to move out after buying the house, would you accept the offer?’
‘Well great! Then time is not the issue here so there’s something else…’ Then ask about the other 3 common objections.
Risk
Risk and discomfort is the unknown. The uncertainty of the future. To tackle this obstacle before it becomes an objection just ask ‘Hey, let’s say everything works out and you decide to proceed. Is there anything that might be a concern for you or feel heavy or unknown?’
This way you can address those issues beforehand.
For handling this as an objection (later in the sales process), this is kind of the ‘generic’ bucket that you can throw everything else into that doesn’t fit in the other 3. It could be anxiety. It could be a lot of work. Simply find out what it is and show them how your real estate business can solve that for them.
Conversion rates for Real Estate Cold Calling
You can find different statistics for the real estate cold calling game but, I prefer to learn from someone who has made hundreds of thousands of cold calls. So, here is what Greg McDaniel says the average conversion rates are for a real estate agent.
250 dials = 1 lead
20 leads = 1 closing
250 dials x 20 leads = 5,000 dials = 1 closing
Considering the average agent can crush through 200 calls per hour on REDX’s triple line dialer, that means they can call 2 hours per day, 5 days per week, and make 4,000 dials.
That’s almost enough to close 1 deal per week. In most markets, this would put an agent over $200k GCI
There is a big learning curve so it could take 10,000- 20,000 cold calls before an agent gets their first listing.
Wrapping up cold calls as a real estate agent
I’ve interviewed and met countless Realtors and investors who have made hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars cold calling for their real estate business. It works, but generally speaking, it is a GRIND.
Not sure you’re ready for that kind of grind? You can either:
