March 19, 2025Real estate professionals spend countless hours and dollars generating leads, but why do so few convert? In this episode, Steve Gerten, CEO of Agent Legend, breaks down how lead intelligence is revolutionizing the industry by helping brokers, agents, and mortgage pros identify and prioritize the right leads. Discover how AI-driven predictive analytics and third-party data integration can drastically improve conversion rates while cutting operational costs. Learn how to maximize your CRM, eliminate wasted outreach, and create a system that delivers sustainable, scalable business growth. If you’re tired of low conversion rates and want a smarter approach to lead follow-up, this episode is a must-listen.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Why Your Leads Aren’t Converting
- 00:00:41 – Meet the Expert Behind High-Conversion Strategies
- 00:01:34 – Lead Intelligence: The Key to Smarter Sales
- 00:04:22 – How to Stop Guessing and Start Closing Deals
- 00:06:01 – Maximize Sales Without Wasting Time on the Wrong Leads
- 00:08:00 – Unlocking the Power of Big Data in Real Estate
- 00:15:06 – Custom AI Models That Predict Your Next Deal
- 00:16:53 – Why Context Matters When Analyzing Lead Data
- 00:17:18 – Lead Scoring Done Right: Focus on Buyers Who Are Ready
- 00:18:03 – The Secret Weapon: Third-Party Data That Gives You an Edge
- 00:18:51 – How to Make Your Sales Team 10x More Effective
- 00:20:40 – The Human Factor: Using Emotional Intelligence to Win Deals
- 00:20:58 – Expansion Playbook: M&A and Ideal Customer Targeting
- 00:21:25 – Your CRM is Gold—Here’s How to Use It Better
- 00:28:48 – What’s Next? The Future of Lead Generation
- 00:32:01 – Final Takeaways to Implement Today
Links and Resources:
- Reside Platform
- Reside Platform Website
- Steve Gerten on LinkedIn
- Connect with Steve
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Reside Platform Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube to leave us a review!
Episode breakdown: lead intelligence and database prioritization
Steve Gerten is the CEO of Agent Legend and once ran a real estate team in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market. His company works with Suneet Agarwal’s own team on a problem most large teams share: a database far bigger than the people available to work it. In this episode the two explain how to decide which contacts deserve a human conversation and which ones should sit in automation until they raise their hand.
Shrink the database to the people showing buying behavior
Suneet’s team has roughly 123,000 contacts, and that number grows every day. Steve’s point is that picking leads at random from a list that size wastes the time of the people making the calls and drives up costs as the database grows. His team analyzed which behaviors matter to buyers and sellers in Suneet’s market, then found the contacts showing them. That cut the working list from 123,000 to 13,000.
With a smaller list, the team makes fewer calls, texts and emails while holding appointments and conversations steady or higher. Steve also suggests suppressing low-value contacts from third-party tools that charge by contact count. Suneet, who runs a team of ISAs, put it more bluntly: if they try to work the whole 120,000-lead elephant, it never gets done.
Train the model on your own past sales
Agent Legend builds a custom model for each team instead of one national model. Steve’s reasoning is that a buyer in Minneapolis behaves differently from one in Sacramento. For Suneet, the process started with a request for his past sales. The model learned how those clients behaved, then looked for the same behavior across the contacts who hadn’t transacted yet.
The inputs combine first-party data, such as email opens and property views, with third-party data matched one to one on name, phone, email and address. Steve says they analyze 1,700 attributes. What comes back into the CRM is a single score. Suneet uses it the simple way: call the A’s hard, and put the F’s on automation until they show interest.
Keep feeding the system with daily activity
The model improves as the team works. Every logged call, note, appointment and pipeline move becomes context the system learns from. Steve warns that results build gradually rather than all at once. Teams that expect an instant win tend to rip out a system, plug in the next one and start over, which he calls incredibly counterproductive.
Start with the data you have to inform everything else, it’ll take care of itself.
Steve Gerten
The same data can also guide which agent works which lead, and teams growing through acquisition use it to find markets with the highest match to their ideal customer profile.
Treat past clients as leads, and make follow-up personal
Steve argues that the bigger opportunity is lifetime value. Agents get busy chasing the next deal and lose touch with people they’ve already helped. He sees it as the team owner’s job to build the system that keeps those relationships warm, so agents can focus on selling.
People view people as past customers. Heck no, they aren’t past customers. They’re still leads. They’re referral sources.
Steve Gerten
Knowing more about each contact also changes the message. Suneet points out that generic “just checking in” texts annoy everyone who receives them. When a team can see where someone is in their journey and what they care about, the follow-up can be specific and thoughtful. Suneet lays out the rest of that process in his guide to real estate lead follow-up systems.
Let humans work the short list and automate the rest
Steve doesn’t think automation replaces people in this business. His formula is to cut the database down to a portion the team’s people can actually work, then automate the remainder. Most people, he says, try to automate everything instead.
His advice for team leaders who want to start today is to get a strong coach or mentor, build systems and processes, and let data inform every decision. Suneet added a warning about teams that choose tactics on instinct.
So many of you guys listening and watching don’t know your data and are making decisions based on feeling.
Suneet Agarwal
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Don’t ask your callers to work the whole database. Narrow it to the contacts showing buying behavior.
- Use your own closed deals to define what a likely buyer or seller looks like in your market.
- Have agents log every call, note and appointment. That activity is what makes scoring better over time.
- Give a new system time to learn before you replace it.
- Keep past clients in active follow-up as leads and referral sources.
- Put your people on the short list and let automation carry the rest.
