How to Win Real Estate Listings in a Tough market

The real estate market is in its fourth consecutive year of historically low transactions. Big brokerages are consolidating, the NAR settlement is still being mishandled in the field, and the Compass vs. Zillow fight over private listings has flooded every Facebook group with noise. According to Darryl Davis, 30-year real estate coach and founder of Power Agent, most of that noise doesn’t need to stop you from listing homes.

Co-authored by the REDX Publishing Team and:

Darryl Davis

Darryl is a 30-year real estate coach and the founder of the Power Agent. He helps his clients make strategic changes to dramatically improve their lives and increase their sense of purpose.

Visit Darryl’s Website, Darrylspeaks.com

In a recent episode of the REDX podcast, Davis joined Curtis Fenn to break down why local agents have a structural advantage over large brokerages and how to turn that advantage into consistent listings without spending a fortune. The full strategy fits inside a $100/month budget. One of the three tactics costs nothing at all.

Here is what Davis shared, and how to put it to work in your business this week.

Why Is All the Industry Drama Keeping Agents from Making Money?

Because staying informed about real estate news feels like productive work, even when it is not. Davis’s framing on this is worth holding onto: “Be informed, but don’t be infected.”

You need to understand what is happening with the private listings dispute, the buyer agency settlement fallout, and which brokerages in your market are selling or downsizing. That context helps you adjust your positioning and have better conversations with sellers.

But spending two hours a day in Facebook groups debating outcomes you cannot control is not strategy. It creates a false sense of progress while your pipeline dries up.

The current market disruptions are real. Some mid-size brokerages are selling because they are caught between scaling up and staying small, and they cannot sustain the costs of both.

Teams that grew by buying leads are contracting now that lead costs have risen and conversion rates have dropped. Understanding these patterns helps you anticipate opportunities. Getting absorbed by the drama around them does not.

How Do You Compete When Big Brokerages Are Absorbing the Market?

Stop competing at their scale. Win at the local level where large organizations cannot move fast enough to follow.

Large brokerages are cruise ships. When they need to change direction, they start planning hours in advance. A local agent is a PT boat. You can pivot the same day, specialize in specific streets and neighborhoods, and be face-to-face with a seller before a corporate call center finishes routing the lead.

Most agents settle for people knowing they are in real estate. The business goes to agents people remember when a real estate need comes up, which are two different things. Recall requires consistent contact and local visibility.

It does not require 20 billboards or a massive ad budget. It does however, require showing up in the same places your community shows up, regularly enough that your name is the one that surfaces when someone says, “We’re thinking about selling.”

For agents who want to build that kind of neighborhood-level presence systematically, real estate farming with a defined geographic focus is the structural approach behind everything Davis describes.

What Are the Best Low-Budget Prospecting Strategies Right Now?

Three specific tactics can generate consistent listing activity for under $100 a month, and one costs nothing. Davis walked through the numbers on each during a recent webinar on shoestring-budget marketing for agents.

The Inline Dialogue (Cost: $0)

Every time you are standing in line somewhere in your community, the people around you are potential leads. Strike up a natural conversation. Ask something simple: “Is this your go-to bakery?”

Then introduce yourself as a local agent who makes recommendations to people moving into the area, and offer a free market analysis.

If you have 200 of these conversations throughout the year and add each person to your CRM, you will cover roughly 12 potential listing clients based on current national listing rates (approximately 6% of homeowners list in a given year).

When you factor in that each person likely knows at least one other person considering a move, you are looking at up to 200 additional referral opportunities from the same 200 conversations.

Just-Because Cards (Cost: Stamps Only)

Ten handwritten cards per week to people in your database. No special occasion required. The message can be as simple as “Was thinking about you, hope the family is doing well.” Real stamp, genuine note, no template.

Five hundred cards per year. Davis’s estimate: at least one commission closes because of this tactic alone. Before you write it off as old-fashioned, consider the ROI. A book of stamps and a few minutes of writing per card, against even a median-priced commission. The math runs decidedly in favor of the cards.

One way to make the outreach feel less generic: use social media as a listening tool before you write. If someone in your database just celebrated a work anniversary or posted photos from a family trip, reference it. That one detail makes a handwritten card memorable instead of forgettable.

The Neighborhood Open House with Slybroadcast + GeoLeads (Cost: ~$50-$100)

This is the highest-leverage tactic on the list, and it runs before the public open house, not instead of it.

The setup: before any public open house, send handwritten invitations formatted like wedding invitations to the neighbors. Let them know the homeowner will not be present and that you are hosting a private tour just for the neighborhood. When people know the homeowner is out, most of them will show up out of curiosity. When they come as “neighbors” rather than as suspects, they are honest about their own plans.

Then pair the invitation with a Slybroadcast voicemail blast. Use REDX GeoLeads to pull cell numbers for 200-500 homeowners around the listing. Upload that list to Slybroadcast with a single recorded message inviting them to the private tour. GeoLeads delivers up to 2,500 contacts per month for $60.

A 500-number Slybroadcast blast runs approximately $50.  Expected turnout based on REDX coaching clients: 40 or more neighbors, versus the handful a standard public open house typically draws.

Do this at two or three homes in the same neighborhood and you become the agent that entire area calls first. That is local dominance at a price most agents can afford this month.

Which Strategy Should You Start With This Week?

Start with the one you will actually do 200 times. Davis made this point about social media and TikTok, but it applies across every tactic on this list. There is no right strategy in real estate.

There is only a strategy you execute consistently. The inline dialogue, the cards, the neighborhood open house, none of them produce results from a single attempt. All of them compound when you repeat them long enough to become the agent people in your area instinctively think of first.

If phone outreach makes you uncomfortable, start with the just-because cards. You will build the contact habit and warm up to more direct conversations over time. If you have an upcoming listing in a neighborhood you want to own, the Slybroadcast open house strategy is the fastest way to put your name on the map there.

If you want to build a repeatable system that scales across multiple neighborhoods without adding significant cost, a geographic prospecting strategy built around GeoLeads and recurring open houses is how that happens.

The market will stay difficult for a while. The Compass and Zillow fight will keep generating headlines. Agents who stay informed, keep prospecting at the local level, and pick one consistent tactic will still list homes this quarter. Agents who wait for the drama to settle will keep waiting.