Your referral relationships are all with people who show up at the end: lenders, title, inspectors, the occasional contractor. A Nashville broker asked for the most underrated opportunity named a different set entirely — the people who are in the room when a family decides something big.
In the lightning round of a podcast interview, the president of Greater Nashville Realtors and managing broker of a RE/MAX office was asked for the most underrated opportunity for agents. He did not answer with a lead source.
He pointed at generational business, the boomer generation specifically, and at the people who sit beside those decisions: "if you're not networking with retirement homes and uh estate attorneys and other people that are making huge life decisions, you're missing an opportunity" to be part of the conversation over the next few years. His observation is that agents network with lenders and stop there.
Two other answers from the same round are worth keeping. The most overrated fear, he said, is a crash — people compare everything to 2008 far too much, and the regulatory structure is different now.
And the one thing every broker should be training agents on this year is pricing. If an agent in your brokerage is overpricing, he says you need to have that conversation, because it reflects on you. He points at agents who came in over the past five years with what he calls quick education, who need to know how to actually evaluate a comp and how to defend it to the other agent.
“if you're not networking with retirement homes and uh estate attorneys and other people that are making huge life decisions, you're missing an opportunity”
Lenders send you buyers who already decided to buy. An estate attorney or the director of a retirement community is present months earlier, at the moment a family realizes a house has to be dealt with — and that is a listing conversation with no competition in it, because nobody else asked to be there.
These relationships are slower and they are earned by being genuinely useful without a transaction attached: a straight answer about what a property needs before it sells, or a contact who can clear a house. That is a year of work, which is exactly why so few agents have done it.