John Schuch · Founder

It was never a lead problem

I sold real estate before I wrote software. The thing I could not stop thinking about was a number.

A buyer agent closes a deal. Somewhere between a quarter and forty percent of that check goes to whoever handed them the buyer. Not to the brokerage. Not to taxes. To the introduction.

I watched good agents treat that as the cost of doing business. Some of them were paying it on the third deal, the tenth, the fiftieth. Years in, still renting the relationship that made their income possible.

And the story they told themselves about it was always the same. I have a lead problem.

They did not have a lead problem.

The buyers were already there

Here is what actually bothered me. The people paying for introductions were paying to meet buyers who were standing in front of houses in their own market, that same week, with their phones out.

There was no scarcity. There was a middleman between the agent and a conversation that was already happening.

That is a completely different problem, and it has a completely different shape. A lead problem means you need to find more people. A middleman problem means you need to stop paying rent on people you could reach yourself.

Once I saw it that way I could not unsee it.

What I got wrong first

I assumed agents did not know. That if somebody just explained the economics, they would change what they were doing.

That was wrong and a little condescending, and it cost me about four months.

Agents know exactly what they are paying. They can tell you the percentage to the decimal. What they do not have is a repeatable thing to do on Monday morning instead. Knowing the math does not give you a workflow, and a workflow is the only thing that actually replaces a habit.

So I stopped writing explanations and started building the Monday morning thing.

What I would say to an agent paying for introductions right now

You are not bad at lead generation. You are paying rent on a relationship you are capable of owning, and you have been told for years that this is just how the business works.

It is worth sitting with how much you have paid so far. Not to feel bad about it. To make the number real enough that you actually change something.

The agents I watched get out of it did not do anything clever. They got in front of buyers directly and consistently, and they kept the relationship that came out of it. That is the whole move. The hard part was never understanding it. The hard part was doing it every single week without it eating the day.

What I built

Listing AutomatEr. It is a desktop app for Mac and Windows that takes the posting work off an agent's plate so that consistency is possible without the day disappearing into it.

I am one person. If you email me you are emailing the guy who wrote it.

listingautomater.com

I am not going to pretend the software is the insight. The insight is that it was never a lead problem. The software is just what I did about it.