The Daily Choice That Separates Top Agents from Everyone Else

I started my career in Silicon Valley doing sales before I made the jump to real estate. I’ve worked with hundreds of agents the past several years and have watched this industry change faster than most people expected. AI has made content production faster. New CRM tools are giving agents visibility they never had before. Video is everywhere. And yet the agents who are actually building scalable businesses are doing something that no tool can automate for them.

They’re choosing the small, uncomfortable action. Every single day.

Your contact list is worth more than your marketing budget

The biggest mistake I see agents make, especially newer ones, is thinking that leads will just show up. That if they post enough on social media or run the right ads, they will dominate their market. It doesn’t work that way.

The truth is that most agents are already sitting on their most valuable asset. It’s the contacts in their phone. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people who already know them, already trust them, and are going through life events right now that could lead to a transaction. But without strategy, those contacts are simply numbers in a phone with no organization, no system, and no plan.

I always advise agents to pick up the phone. Call people from your sphere every single day while you are out on a walk or have a 30-minute drive. That is the thing that moves the needle more than anything else.

The problem is that most agents try to keep up with their sphere by scrolling social media, hoping they’ll catch the engagement announcement, the new baby, or the job relocation. You’re going to miss things. You’d have to spend hours a day on social media to catch every update from every person who matters in your network.

This is actually where I’m really excited about the new AI CRM. We have a feature available in our client’s accounts, giving them a strategy around who they should be reaching out to and why. You can set up custom tags that match how you actually think about your sphere, instead of being forced into whatever categories a generic CRM decides you need.

That flexibility matters because one of the biggest barriers to growing with the right system is that the tools provided to agents don’t always match how they work. When you can customize it, you actually use it.

Block time for your CRM the same way you’d block time for showings. Treat it like a revenue-generating activity, because that’s exactly what it is.

The agents who break through are the ones willing to hustle

When I think about the Gen Z agents or newer agents who are actually making it in this business, they all have something in common. They take action. They are volunteering to host open houses for seasoned agents. They are participating in community events. They are dropping off local fruit to every neighbor, telling them about their career move. They are doing the things that nobody else wants to do, and they understand that the first couple of years are going to require that kind of hustle to break in.

There’s no shortcut here. You have to put in two or three years of hard work before things start compounding. The newer agents who leave our industry are the ones who expected the business to come to them without being intentional daily.

One thing I always recommend for people just starting out (or anyone breaking into a new market) is to be specific when you’re seeking advice. Don’t send a generic “Can I pick your brain?” message. That’s not powerful enough.

Instead, try something like, “I know you excel at content production, and I’m really interested in your process for choosing topics. Can I buy you a coffee and pick your brain for 30 minutes next Tuesday at 10 AM?” When you show that you’ve done your homework and you respect someone’s time, they almost always say yes.

Hustling means walking through the doors you want to open. When I was responsible for co-expanding a brokerage into Northern California, I had to build a presence in communities where the sign on our door was brand new. That meant walking into local businesses with local cookies and a specific ask for collaborations.

It meant showing up to events where I didn’t know anyone. It meant putting myself out there over and over, even when it was uncomfortable and I was the least experienced in the room. Building a business in a new community is about entrenching yourself in that community, and there’s no way to do that from behind a screen.

Gen Z gets a bad reputation, but they have a real edge

There’s a stereotype out there that Gen Zers are job hoppers with an instant gratification issue. And I’ll be honest, that perception can be a real obstacle as my generation builds our careers. What people underestimate about Gen Z is that this generation has had computers in their classrooms and cell phones before they could drive.

They understand social media on an intuitive level. They know how to create content, how to build an audience, and how to use technology as a genuine business tool. That’s a real advantage in an industry where so many agents are intimidated by posting a Reel.

If you’re a Gen Z agent, lean into that. Your comfort with technology is one of your biggest differentiators. And if you’re a more experienced agent working alongside Gen Z, pay attention.

The best teams I’ve seen have a mix of generational strengths. The experienced agent brings the relationships and market knowledge. The younger agent brings the tech fluency and the content instincts. When those two things come together, and technology is worked into strategy, everyone levels up.

The biggest opportunity nobody is talking about

Here’s something I spoke about with my team just this week. “The Great Wealth Transfer” is an unprecedented event already happening as younger generations inherit real estate. This is a massive wave, and most agents aren’t doing anything to position themselves for it.

These younger buyers and sellers do their homework before they ever reach out to an agent. They’re reading reviews. They’re looking at your online presence. They’re checking your track record and your data before sending a text.

If that information isn’t easy to find and organize, you’ve already lost them.

One approach I’ve recommended to agents is hosting educational sessions geared toward younger people who might be inheriting property for the first time. Ask your brokerage if you can use the conference room for a couple of hours.

Put together a free session on what to do when you inherit a home, and then tie it to something social, like a networking event or pizza afterward. It’s old-school in the best way (in-person, educational, community-driven) but aimed at a generation that most agents are completely ignoring.

The agents who start building trust with this demographic now, before the wealth transfer really picks up speed, are going to have a serious head start.

If you’re going to tell people to do it, do it yourself

I spend a lot of time encouraging clients to use video content and post on LinkedIn. Video is the most underused tool agents have, and the ROI on even simple, authentic video is enormous compared to static posts. But at some point, I realized that I couldn’t keep telling people to do something I wasn’t doing myself.

So I started a LinkedIn video series on Gen Z in the professional world, focused on how younger professionals can thoughtfully elevate their careers. I use ChatGPT to help me with scripting, which saves a ton of time and lets me focus on delivery instead of staring at a blank page.

AI has made content production so much easier that there’s really no excuse anymore. The time you save on creating content can go straight into thinking more strategically about your business, your positioning, and where you want to be in two years.

You don’t need to start a video series tomorrow. But if you believe phone calls matter, you should be making phone calls. If you believe video works, you should be on camera. The agents who build real businesses hold themselves to the same standard they set for everyone around them.

The choice is the same every morning

Everything I’ve talked about here comes down to one pattern. The phone call you don’t feel like making. The open house you volunteer to host on a Saturday. The cookies you walk into a business where nobody knows your name. The video you record, even though you’d rather just write a caption. The educational event you organize for a generation of buyers that most agents haven’t even thought about yet.

Every day, you get to choose between the comfortable thing and the thing that actually grows your business. They are almost never the same thing. The agents who figure that out early and keep choosing accordingly are the ones who build something that lasts.