Building your Database - Expert Advice

Art Valenzuela · August 2023

If Location, Location, Location are the 3 most important words in Real Estate then Database, Database, Database are the 3 most important words in starting, maintaining, and building a real estate business.

Statistics over the past 2+ decades have shown that it takes 80 to 160 contacts to close ONE transaction. What? Exactly! This means that if you were going to close 12 transactions in a Calendar year you would need to speak to 960 to 1,920 people over the course of a 12-month period.

In any initial Coaching Consult I conduct, one of the first questions I ask is, how many contacts are in your database? The response I receive often is 10, 25 or 50. You can start to see why so many agents come out of the gate really excited but are quickly disillusioned because they simply don’t have enough people to talk to.

Here are a handful of suggestions to grow your database quickly (get to 200 as fast as possible and to 1000 within the first 6 months and then it will grow organically, faster than you can keep up):

1. Add everyone that you know without prejudice (doesn’t matter how much money you think they have or don’t have or where they live and what their status in life is) if they are an adult with a name and at least one contact form, email or phone number, add them.

2. Ask your spouse/partner/significant other for as many contacts as they have. They have a vested interest in your success, they will be more than happy to help you.

3. Ask your Mom, Dad, Mother-in-Law, Father-in-Law for Contacts. They want to see you successful so they can protect their savings accounts (just kidding…sort of).

4. Ask your Priest, Rabbi, Pastor, Minister, Counselor, Hair Stylist, Attorney, CPA (get the picture? Anyone who is respected and has influence) for contacts and referrals.

5. Go through old phonebooks, Rolodex (aging myself here), email accounts, sports rosters (your kids), church/group rosters, etc. There’s gold in there. There might be a lot of outdated info but you will be surprised how many will have valid/active contact information.

My motto is, “The person who leaves this earth with the most contacts is the winner”. Have fun building your database.

Pro-Tip- While adding people to your database, call the number to see if it’s still active and tell them or in some cases, remind them, you are in real estate. Something like: “Hey, (name of friend/contact), I’m just going through some old phone rosters and checking to see which phone numbers still work. How have you been? Great, me too…time sure can get away from us. I don’t know if you ever told you, but I’m a real estate agent in (name of city you are located) and the surrounding area. We should meet up for coffee or (whatever beverage works) and catch up. It would be great to see you. How does next Tuesday at 11am work?"

If you would benefit from more tips like this, come join me in the Real Estate Accelerator program where we get agents off the ground and running.

Please share any tips that you've found helpful in building your database.