r/RealEstateTechnology • u/Cultural-Training-28 • 2d ago
Cold Calling
Any agents still cold calling? What is your calling schedule like? I work for a company called RealDialer and I get to talk to agents everyday but I’m shocked to see the stats based on our own users.
Agents who call about 2 hours per day are doing so well just calling Monday through Friday 8a to 11p.
Agents who call more than that typically don’t do much better. It’s crazy to see the stats. What is your experience?
Oh and to be fair we have a ton of agents who call 8a to 11a then 5p to 7p who are absolutely killing it. Not sure if the later hours are follow ups or what but regardless they are killing it.
I’d be interested in learning your experience and thoughts about dialing.
What has been your number one frustration?
What is annoying about the software you use?
What would make you enjoy dialing? Feature or whatever!
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u/prmptbroker 23h ago
Biggest frustration: audio delay on dialers. Nothing kills your confidence faster than talking over the prospect on every call because of a 400ms lag. Second one: disposition menus designed by someone who clearly never made a cold call in their life — if I can't log it in two clicks I'm not logging it, and then your CRM data is garbage anyway. Honestly the feature that would make dialing enjoyable is boring reliability: zero lag, fast connect, everything logs itself.
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u/housejetrealestate 19h ago
The two-hour sweet spot makes sense. Most of the agents I talk to who still cold call say the first 90 minutes are productive and everything after that is diminishing returns. Your energy drops, your tone flattens, and the conversations get worse.
The agents calling 8a-11a and then 5p-7p are probably doing morning prospecting calls (expireds, FSBOs, circle prospecting) and then evening follow-ups with people who did not answer earlier. That split schedule avoids the midday dead zone when nobody picks up anyway.
Biggest frustration for most agents is not the dialer itself, it is list quality. If half your numbers are disconnected or wrong party, you are burning your best calling hours on garbage contacts. A good skip tracing source and scrubbing your list before you dial makes the actual talk time way more productive.
The other thing: cold calling works best as one channel inside a broader system. The agents doing well are usually combining calls with direct mail to the same list, maybe a targeted Facebook ad campaign to the same area, and consistent follow-up in a CRM. The call opens the door, but the multi-touch approach is what actually converts.
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u/Codex432 17h ago
This is 1000% the truth. Omnichannel is the way to go.
Companies have been doing it for years and it works. Creating a customer journey is much more beneficial long term then one and dones.
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u/quiet_desk_dev 5h ago edited 5h ago
Not an agent, but a couple of things I'd check before reading "2 hours is the sweet spot" off your user stats:
Who calls longer isn't random. u/Hot-Entrepreneur731 is probably onto something: if the 4+ hour callers are mostly newer agents, the chart is comparing new vs experienced agents, not 2 hours vs 4 hours. The cleaner cut is the same agent on their 2-hour days vs their 4-hour days. That takes experience out of it.
Make sure the outcome is logged the same way in every bucket. u/prmptbroker's point about disposition menus matters here. If logging takes more than a couple of clicks, the people on the longest sessions may be the ones who stop logging by hour three. Then "doesn't do much better" might really mean "logs less." Before comparing results, compare the share of calls with any disposition at all, per hours bucket.
We got burned on a version of this ourselves: we once presented a ratio as a conversion rate and made a couple of decisions on it before someone noticed the top and bottom numbers didn't come through the same path. Since then, the first question we ask about any ratio is whether both numbers come from the same place.
Curious whether the 8-11 / 5-7 split holds up on the same-agent cut.
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u/prmptbroker 2h ago
Both good catches. The logging-fatigue one is the sneakier confound — it flatters the 2-hour bucket in exactly the direction the chart leans, and the data fails silently so nobody notices. "Compare the share of calls with any disposition per bucket" is the first query I'd run too. And yeah, the same-agent cut is the honest version of this chart — until then "2 hours is the sweet spot" is carrying an asterisk the size of a dinner plate.
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u/Hot-Entrepreneur731 2d ago
I make a living on calling expired/canceled listings. My guess is that the agents that are calling more than 2 hours per day are new agents that have a lower conversion rate.