KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Strategies for Powerful Lead Generation with Lance Cutsen

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Summary:This episode features Lance Cutsen, a real estate expert, who provides a tactical masterclass on consistent and powerful lead generation. The discussion emphasizes the importance of a multi-pronged approach that leverages both high-touch, relational strategies (like leveraging your Sphere of Influence) and scalable, online systems. Cutsen provides actionable insights on the necessity of consistent follow-up, creating a clear value proposition, and utilizing technology to streamline the lead conversion process. This is an essential listen for agents seeking a predictable and high-volume source of clients.

You're listening to the John Kitchens podcast experience. This is your host, John Kitchens. Get ready to gain clarity, build confidence, and uncover the framework to become the CEO of your real estate business. Your journey to seven figures. Success starts now. What is up, everybody, man? Thank you guys. Tune in to another episode of the one big fire live.

And like always, we're bringing the fire. And Albi, I'm excited to you to introduce our guest and ready to cannonball in here. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've really focused heavily on and helping agents get into production is obviously lead generation. It's something that's talked about a lot. It's also something that there's a million different ways of doing it. and we know that Lance and his team have really nailed the model. And I'm just excited to learn more about what you guys got.

You guys always got something good going on over there. But yeah, Jay. Yeah, I'm excited about this conversation. Lance, how many leads a month would you say that Realty.com is generating right now? Just over 50,000. So there's some opportunity to be had. So, you know, certainly, it may be talking. maybe talk a little bit about your model because I think, you know, I think agents get a surface

level understanding of leads. They, you know, they buy Zillow leads and they buy Realger.com leads and, you know, and there's, you know, starting to do some demand generation type things. And when they get a little bit more advanced and understanding, you know, they, they, they want to have access to leads and whatnot. What is, what was your business model? How, how are you generating this, that many leads? And, and maybe explain kind of what it is that you're doing for agents and then we'll talk a little bit more about kind of opportunities people have to get involved yeah definitely so thank you jay and thank you everyone for having me here it's great i'm a honey badge of myself and proud of it so and you know here we are on the eve of a major hurricane in florida so i do

wish everyone the best for milton but uh you know on that note i'm a florida and myself and i'm out here hiding in houston away from the storm today stay safe everybody yes stay safe so um so we're a national lead portal and what Realty.com is. It's a, it's a platform based around exclusivity. It started where every agent in America can buy their own city. So to give you an idea, I'll name a few Honey Badger, you have Veronica Figaro owns Orlando with us, or you have Jonathan Alfonso owns the Miami area with us. But then you've got people like Ari Lopez out in Houston who owns Conroe and the Woodlands with us. So there's all different areas where what we do is we partner with an agent in the city and we work with them to push Realty.com as a whole

whole, and the more we grow together, the more successful the agent becomes. And then we have coaches on staff. We have ISAs on staff. And what we do is we have the leads. They come in through a portal. We integrate into FUB. We integrate into Chime, lofty. Any CRM you can think of, we integrate into. When they come in, we say first responsibility is speed to lead is on you guys, but we'll also come and call the leads with you. So that's our primary product. And we have a couple new products in the pipeline that we can talk about today. But it's really about producing sellers and buyers. And over the last 12 months since the NARA lawsuit, we've gotten really heavy on the sellers. And one thing we've learned is that it's really hard to get someone to say,

raise their hand and say, hey, I want to list my house. But it's a little bit easier to say, hey, can you give me a cash offer on my home? It means they have some intent to sell. And if they have some intent to sell, basically there's a chance that, one, you can get an Expe Express offer, open door, offer, fair, homeward. Or two, you can flip it into a listing when they're not happy with that instant offer. Hey, Lane, so just,

just kind of, you know, kind of break down how you guys are staying market exclusive, right? Like we've all, you know, written through all the, all the platforms starting out with, with Howard,

with Tiger Leads, and to Greer with Boomtown. And then obviously, you know, are way deep in with Dwayne with Commission's Inc. And you see those models, right, they come out and they promise exclusivity.

And then all of a sudden, for them to, continue to grow, then you've got like, you know, 43 people in your market that have the same platform. I mean, how are you guys, you know, staying exclusive but also, you know, able to grow on your own, right? Realty.com able to continue to grow. It's been a little bit of a struggle with the exclusivity because you'll have 20 people in one city that want it. So we do have some alternative products that we have. We have the Realty Seller Pro, Realty Pro that we'll talk about a little bit later. But, you know, we've been live for about four, four and a half years now.

And to this day, Kyle Whistols had four years in San Diego, the Freeman's multiple years in the Dallas market, Veronica, almost five years in the Orlando market. And unlike other ones, you know, we've chosen to take that financial hit to allow the exclusivity to continue and be loyal to our customer base because we're a portals. Tiger Leeds isn't a portal. Boontown isn't a portal.

Nobody, none of them were portals. Sink isn't a portal. And if we grow together, we're basically partners in this. And what that means is that you might not get an ROI today. And leads take nine months to continue. But the agents that started with me three or four years ago are paying the same as they paid four years ago. And they're getting four or five times the amount of leads because of how much

organic traffic has grown. Can you define what that is, what you just said? We're a portal. We're not a platform or whatever, you know, they're kind of classified. Just to kind of unpack that so everybody's clear. So basically, and you know, this is nothing against sync or Boone Town or any of the others. but on Singra Boomtown, you have, let's say, John sells homes and Columbus.com, or J.Sells Homesin Tennessee.com, or whatever your domain is, or fancy luxury homes.com.

And what those other companies doing is they're pushing all the traffic to your individual domain. And it's much harder to get quality traffic to random domains all over the internet, where it is when you own the city with us, we push all the traffic to Realty.com. So as we grow, you know, right now we're probably, you know, we have about 2,000 cities live of 20,000. And as we grow, we want to do Super Bowl ads one day if we get big enough. But we want to do, you know, we want to do campaigns similar to what other portals are doing, where we have playoff ads, TV ads. We're already doing connected TV like Bulu and different things like that.

And the more we do that, it's much simpler to send quality traffic to one place. And it's to send it to 20, you know, 20 different websites or 2,000 different websites. Love it. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So you were talking. talked about so some of the people they've our listeners are me they're going to

to really dot com right now checking it out they may find out shoot my zip code's taken is it by zip code or is it by county it's by usps city that's how we do it right so let's say you know some of our listeners they're like man mind's taken what were some of the other products that you guys are helping to put put new business in agents laps yeah so one thing we've noticed is is that we have between google and bing about 40 million index pages which is great for SEO and continues to get us traffic. So we have two new products. One is called Realty.com Pro. And Realty.com Pro is super simple. It's 2495.

You get basically an IDX search page that has national search, which we can screen share if we'd like, I could show it to you. And then on top of IDX search, you get something called LeadFrenzy. We own other domains. We own listing.com. We own Texas.com. We own Estimate.com. We own North Dakota.com and Arizona.com. And the domain list continues. And we have a partner networkers of domains of when someone's looking for a home on one of those domains,

we frenzy it to the person that owns the profile in our area. And you jump to get that lead first. So it's 2495 a month. It comes with lead frenzy coaching. We do group coaching with Wally Wrestler and Bill Pipe is going to do a coaching session with us. We love both. And then we also do seller nurturing. So imagine this at 2495.

It's like a home bot fellow hybrid where you can upload your database to our portal and we'll nurture the leads send them and we'll send them listing reports we'll send them reports of your home value we'll send them you know who's selling in your area and then we have AI blogging and then national search where the lead stays with you it's kind of similar to your link your lead but completely national on your profile so that and that product is 25 bucks a month and it's open to all the XP agents and most the XP agents already have a profile set up and then we also have one called seller pro which is the same as that it's $150 a month and what you get to do is you get to do is you get to jump at seller leads. We guarantee at least two seller opportunities a month, and most of them

are looking for cash offers. So we got, you know, we have off training, convert a cash offer into a listing or get a cash offer accepted. And then on most of those cash offers, we'll have homework, instant offers attached with it, ready to go for your eyes only until you're ready to share it with a customer. And then when those seller leads come in, it's the same thing. You get email and your text, you get, you jump. It integrates directly into your CRM. You get that lead. It's your lead exclusively. And this is the most banged, your buck that any lead portal has ever done on these two products. No doubt. It's it's it's it's it's reminds me when I was in production you know John we we are anything like this is always a yes

right like it's just another pillar it's another angle it's another thing it's inexpensive it's going to produce it's a high ROI you just want to if you can get it you want to get it it makes it makes perfect sense so yeah so um go ahead yeah so I was going to say it's and then the other thing is that it's all competitive atmosphere. One, you get the blogging and the nurturing and all that stuff, but you get to compete with other agents for the lead, which is cool. That's what's creating. We're getting more conversion on the competition leads than we're getting on people who own cities right now. Nice. You said Homeward Instant offers your eyes only. Explain what that is exactly on the cash offers. Any market, Homeward is live and we're partnered with them. Basically,

what we're doing is attached to the seller lead on Cellar Pro and if you own a city from us, Homeward offer that's a PDF ready to go that you can work with Homeward to close that deal. So, Stephanie, to go to Homeward, enter all the information and do everything, we're already partnered with them and you've got that lead ready to go from Homeward. We have reps on staff that work with Homeward that can help you with that too. Nice. Cool. So Lance, you had mentioned that you guys are, you have an ISA staff.

You know, I know that Zillow at one time, I don't know if they still did, but they had, you know, they were the speed delete thing they were calling them and then you know kind of uh transferring live transfers to the agents in a round robin fashion is that a similar uh experience or product that you know part of your product offering oh so we have a couple of things that we can do at iSA we have all a car iSA for pro members but if you own a city it includes it and it's not round robin because it's exclusive you can decide on your team where it goes let's say jay has a hundred agent team and he wants it to ring all hundred agents and press one to accept or if you're If he wants to run rob at it, we can do that.

We could basically fit the ISA to however the agent wants. Got it. I'm sure that that was a learning process because some agents have really good dialed in systems and processes and others maybe not as well as much. So it's cool that that's flexible. We beg people every day to answer the phones. Every day. You would think it would not be a problem.

However, it still is. So, Lance, I'm just kind of curious, you know, just from a data standpoint, point, you said, you know, about 50,000 opportunities a month. You've been at it for, you know, five years. Are you seeing steady growth? Has it been a decline in search? Just kind of went from a, from a month over month perspective, just kind of activity and engagement and, you know, real demand in the marketplace. So we've seen steady growth always just because we keep indexing more pages and growing as a whole. And the more engagement we get, the better we do. The one thing we've really seen as people looking at home valuations more, people asking for cash offers a little bit more.

We've really tried to pivot to that kind of like seller, seller model. And, you know, with, you see, we used to be really about find a home find a loan. Now we're really like, come see where your home is worth. And, you know, we really try to go seller focus. We used to be about 80, 20, 80% buyers, 20% sellers. We're trying to be now probably about 30% sellers and then just going up from there. I love that. What, so what, where are you seeing the, so you're saying? So you're saying, on the kind of the motivated seller, the more of the cash offer is kind of the offer that's starting to resonate a little bit more in the market. Yeah, everybody wants a number. And if you know how to, you know, if you know how to work with a wholesale lead or a cash offer lead or a

flip and you're that season agent that understands it, you're going to make a lot of money on leads like this. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We're starting to see, there's always been a gap between, you know, your high producers and your low producers. And I, you know, what I've been witnessing is, that gap starting to get bigger and bigger. We have agents, excuse me, we have teams and agents, mostly teams, though, that are having their best year ever. And then on the opposite spectrum, we have people dropping out of the business.

And I mean, there's a lot that you can attribute to that. But I think that, you know, our model has been, other than just, you know, delivering the training and everyone's got training in the SNAP, but it's that generating enough, needs so that an agent is able not to feel like they're on the income roller coaster, the real estate roller coaster, one good month, one bad month. And what I like about what you've said so far, you know, and look, Zillow is a competitor

of yours out, you know, everyone's going after the same dollar when it comes to lead gen. But Zillow's taking a huge chunk, what, 35, 40 percent. You can send that. There's any kind of percentage. When you buy a zip code, a postal code, as you put it, There's no referral fee coming back to realty.com. Yeah. So one, we don't take a referral fee.

That's the first thing. And then two, on top of that, we're a lower cost per lead. So even if you have Zillow, Premier Agent, and I actually believe in Zillow, which is really, really expensive, you know, our average cost per lead realized is somewhere between, say, $35 and $75, where there's, you know, I just bid out Boca Raton, Florida, and it was 1,500 to lead. But we have no referral fee.

And especially with our pro memberships at $25 a month, and $150 a month, imagine you get these frenzy leads, you close a couple of them, and you still have no referral fees. We're the only product like this without any referral fees. Yeah. And I mean, look, I'll take that. I'll take that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of, a lot of people talk about quality, right? One of the reasons I think people get on that, uh, that Zillow, I'll say it, crack rock, you know, like they once they get on, they can't get often because the impression is that they're a higher quality of lead for whatever reason, maybe because there's no opt-in at the beginning.

They love the UI, the experience of them using the site. So they're warmed up and they become a higher quality lead. Is that what you're seeing on Realty.com? I mean, what are you hearing about lead quality? So this is what I'm going to tell anyone that's buying a lead anywhere but Zillam. You get 100 leads from any portal that aren't a Zillow lead. 60 of them are complete garbage. 30 of them are two years out.

10 of them have some type of intent. Out of those 10, if you close, one of them has to pay your bill. 1% has to pay your bill. 2% you're doing good. 3% you're great. And 4% you love us. So we have some agents that close at 1% and they're happy because they use it for recruiting. We have some agents that close at 3 to 5%.

And it's amazing. And then we have some agents that close at 0% because they just don't follow up. They don't do best practices. And it's a grind. Like if you're paying $1,000 or $1,500 for a Zillow lead, like you said, the Zillow Crack, you're taking a lot of risk there because if you go on vacation, if there's a storm, if anything happens, you could be $20, $30,000 in the whole. Where with this, if you're paying, you know, $75 a lead or less,

you've got a little bit more runway, but you've got a lot more. you've got to grind out. So you've got to be willing to grind it out. If you're willing to grind it out, you're going to build a pipeline. You're going to build before what people. You're going to build for your future. You're going to have cash offer and seller leads coming in. But the biggest thing is, is you've got to be willing to do the work. If you're not willing to do the work, it's not worth buying a product like this. We have agents that win and we have agents that lose. And then each lead you've got to realize is an individual person. You're not buying an item. You're buying contact information with a person and you never know where that person is in their life. You never

know what's going on. And that's one of the biggest things is that you can have one city where you get 100 leads and 20 of them are amazing. You can get one city where you get 100 leads and one of them is great because you don't know what's going on with any of those individual lives. Lance, is there something within the portal where you guys are helping kind of nurture those 30 that are two years out? I mean, you know, I mean, I can give you a $1.8 million lesson we learned in 2016 just from the lack of follow-up. And so, you know, as from a portal perspective, are you guys, you know, doing anything to help,

help these agents be able to kind of nurture and make sure that notoriously not letting everything fall through the cracks? We continue to ISA, the leads, for up to two years. I see leads from 2021, even being live transits agents. We kind of say some of the nurturing is supposed to be on you guys because most of you guys have wild or you have fub or you have lofty and you have some type of nurturing process, we do coach for best CRM practices. So we'll go and do a one-on-one session with you.

And if you're on a city with us and basically go into your CRM and look at your automations and see what you've got going on there. And then we do group coaching too, which, you know, is also best practices. We do Lopty and KV.C.C.C.C.C.C. And Fubb and all the in Boomb Town and a few of the others. But we continue calling that lead for at least two years, usually. Is the best practice that you see? It's like I always think about, you know, and John, you know, as we did this when we started the brokerage in Dallas, you're like, you know, there's the contact rate and I spoke to speak to somebody and you determine timing and motivation. And then you've got them in a bucket that you're following up with. And, you know, our best practice, I think was half the time or whatever from what they said that they were going to do. Then, you know, what, I mean, what are you, what are you seeing that that's working the best to bubble up opportunities? to have us spoke to to engage them in these campaigns.

Because obviously everybody has a different tool. It's all doing the same things plus or minus 10% in terms of trying to create engagement. What have you seen that's working the best in terms of best practices for bubbling up someone who you've never had a conversation with that became a lead, say, a year ago or six months ago or whatever? On the sellers, it's at we have an instant offer ready on your home. Right. We're giving them something material, getting in front of them, getting to the home. Can I stop over and present it to you?

on the buyers, it's just saying, hey, I could show you some off market listings in the area, especially YXP. I know you guys have the private marketplace now for listings. It's trying to give them something that they can't go see themselves. Gotcha. That's gold right there. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I think when, you know, we had Ryan Young on a month or so ago.

And I think that's where he was talking to, right, is, you know, really what they can't find in any other portal, any other sites. It's about, you know, what do you have that I can't find on my own from a buyer's research and perspective, being able to kind of put that out there. So, no, that that's really, really good. And I think, you know, you guys being able to offer the constant nurturing just because, you know, I can see a lot of agents, even on the lower end, even with us, right? I mean, we took every, we tried every precaution, but we still had holes in the bucket where things were falling through.

So if you're able to help bubble up those opportunities, Man, talk about what a game changer on, you know, having that as part of your business. Well, the most important thing really is, is, you know, for the pro members now, the ones that are, you know, $25 a month is that you can sign up with us, create your profile today. You go to realty.com forward slash pro, and then you can upload your entire database and we'll start nurturing it for free. No extra charge. That's awesome. Good sellers. You upload all your sellers and we'll send them all home evaluations, market reports, all.

all that stuff, no additional charge. No brainer. Love it. Well, Lance, I really appreciate you coming on. The truth is that it's the number one problem that agents are going to have. You know, I mean, anyone can really learn with a little bit of effort and half a brain how to, you know, present, talk to clients, show a house, even list a house. but the elusive part of this business seems to be the marketing piece. We love it.

We've been studying it for decades, but it's not what's taught in real estate school. No one knows it. In fact, most of the people, I mean, John, Jay, we see it all the time. New agents coming in, they're just lost. They're like, where do I start? I mean, they're giving a CRM, but you've got to feed the CRM. It doesn't just feed itself. So, yeah, I love it.

Awesome. You guys have been such an awesome supporter of our top teams at EXP. And we love that you're a partner of ours. And can't wait to see what we're going to do in the future. Cool. Thanks. I appreciate it. And also, fortunes in the follow-up.

We all know that. So people can buy leads. And, you know, one of the key questions I ask when I'm onboarding a new customer is who you use for lead generation. If they say Zillow, and I'm like, how do you do on Zillow? It was horrible. They were the worst leads ever. I sometimes tell them, you're probably not a good fit for us because if you've failed miserably

at Zillow, you're probably. probably didn't follow up. You probably didn't follow processes. You probably don't know how to do lead gen. We'd be happy to coach you, but you really got to understand that you've got to follow up with lead. You've got to bring people down the phone. Yeah.

Love it. We've got a EXP con. Yep. You've got two booths EXP con and I will be on stage Monday and Tuesday, I believe. But will you be at Flo Rida on Monday night? I will clap by, yes. Mr. Whistle, baby, whistle baby. I'm excited for Miami.

Can't wait to see you, Lance. Yep, I can't wait to see you guys too. Thanks for having me. Realty.com slash pro for anyone that wants to find their profile. We've created profiles for all your XP agents already. So you've already got your profile ready to go. Love that. All right.

We'll see you in Miami. We'll see you at the top, everybody. Appreciate you. I see it. Thanks. Thanks for tuning in. If today's episode inspired you, follow for more conversations like this and gain valuable insights from the leading experts in the industry.

If you want to dive a little bit deeper, check out johnchitchens.coach to find the ways that we can work together. Once again, this is your host, John Kitchens. Keep making it happen.