How Do I Build a Real Estate Database From Nothing?

Target a hundred names in two weeks, built from prompts rather than from memory. Most people can recall about forty people off the top of their head and actually know closer to two hundred. The gap between those two numbers is the difference between a slow first year and a good one.

Why memory fails

Because recall is associative and unreliable. Sitting down to think of everyone you know produces the people you saw most recently, not the people who are most likely to move.

Prompts work because they search a category rather than a feeling. Asking yourself who do I know returns forty names. Asking who did I work with at my last job returns twelve you had not thought of, and there are fifteen more categories like it.

The prompts

Work through these one at a time, writing every name that surfaces before moving on. Do not filter for whether they might buy.

Where to mine them from

Four places, and doing all four takes about three hours.

Export your phone contacts. Export your email contacts. Scroll your social followings and connections. Scroll your outgoing call log. Between those four you will usually find more than a hundred names without thinking of a single one unaided.

What to record

Three fields. Anything more is procrastination.

1. 1A phone number. Worth ten email addresses, because conversations happen on it.
2. 2One note about them as a person. How you know them, and the last real thing you know about their life.
3. 3A next touch date. The most important field in the whole system.

The note is what separates a message that gets a reply from one that gets ignored. If you cannot write a note for someone, they belong in the low-priority group and you should expect less from them.

Where should it live?

One place, and a spreadsheet is fine to start.

A CRM you will not open is worse than a spreadsheet you will. Learn a CRM in week two or three, once you have a hundred names and a reason to care. The most common database failure is not the wrong tool, it is contacts spread across a phone, a spreadsheet, a CRM trial and a notebook with no complete list anywhere.

Do not filter as you go

The instinct is to skip people who obviously will not buy. Resist it.

You cannot tell who will move, and more importantly you are not building a list of buyers. You are building a list of people who will know what you do, and any one of them might mention you to somebody else. The person least likely to move is frequently the one who refers you.

How fast should you build it?

Two weeks, and treat it as the first real work of your career.

Forty names in week one, a hundred by the end of week two, and the first fifty contacted while you are still adding. Building the list and working it are not sequential, and waiting until the list is perfect is a common way to spend a month on preparation.

How do you keep it growing?

Five new names every working day. It takes ten minutes.

Anyone you spoke to, anyone you were introduced to, anyone who might plausibly move in the next five years. Five a day is roughly twelve hundred a year, and that number is what makes year three completely different from year one.

Should you segment it?

Yes, into three groups, and it takes about two hours once the list exists.

Past clients, close friends and anyone who has referred you go in the top group and get four touches a year, at least two of which are a call or a face. People you know reasonably well go in the middle and get quarterly contact, personal and specific. Everyone else gets something useful roughly monthly.

Segmenting is what makes the list workable. Without it you either treat two hundred people identically, which means treating all of them like strangers, or you treat none of them at all.

What if the list is small?

Then add a pipeline that produces strangers, and keep building in parallel.

Open houses are the usual answer, because they are free, available this weekend, and produce ten conversations in three hours. Every visitor who gives you a number is a name in the database, which means the pipeline that feels like lead generation is also the one rebuilding your list.

The Database 100 worksheet with all the prompts and ruled space to write, plus the five daily non-negotiables including five new names a day, and a week-by-week plan for the first ninety days.

[Download The 90-Day Launch Plan (free)](/free/90-day-launch-plan/)