A marketing plan for new real estate agents: 90 days, mostly hours, barely money

Before any post or postcard, build the list of everyone who knows you. Phone contacts, former colleagues, the gym, the school run, the family group chat. Two hundred names is normal once you stop filtering.

Announce personally, not by broadcast. A text or a call in your own words: I got licensed, I am working with this brokerage, and I am building my first client list. Who do you know who is thinking about moving this year?

Notice the ask. It is never will you buy a house from me. It is who do you know, which gives every person a way to help that costs them nothing.

Put every name in one place with notes, even a spreadsheet. Agents who fail rarely lack charm. They lack a list they actually work.

You do not need your own listing to run an open house. Busy agents at your brokerage have Saturdays they cannot cover. Ask for them, and most will hand you two this month.

The open house is the one place where buyers without an agent walk in and start the conversation themselves. For a new agent that is oxygen.

Work it as an event: learn names, ask what each visitor is actually hunting for, offer one useful thing, and send it the same evening. This house does not have to fit them. The next one might.

Two open houses a week, followed up properly, give a new agent more real conversations than any purchased list could.

Every early conversation triggers the same quiet check: someone searches your name. Make what appears answer for you.

One hour, blocked in the calendar, phone in hand: follow-ups from the weekend's open house, five people from the list, one neighborhood conversation. Count conversations per week, not deals.

The honest math of a new agent's first quarter: 90 days rarely closes much of anything. This quarter seeds months four to nine, because every established agent's pipeline is last quarter's habit arriving.

Protect the hour from the fake work. Rearranging a CRM, redesigning a business card and studying logo fonts feel like marketing and produce nothing. A conversation produces.

A new agent cannot fake authority and should not try. What you have instead is the one story nobody established can tell: learning this business in public.

Film one short take a week on a phone: the thing that surprised you at this week's inspection, what earnest money actually is, what you learned hosting Saturday's open. Plain answers to the questions you just watched real buyers ask.

People root for a newcomer who shows the process, and in a year this becomes the archive that proves how far you came.

Consistency beats brilliance, and week one will be awkward. Post it anyway. The habit is the asset; the polish arrives on its own.

Almost everything above costs time. The spending that remains is small: printing for the open house, and later some modest mail to a first micro-farm once the list is being worked.

Video has a floor that costs nothing: the phone plus the caption tools built into the apps. Start there. On a new agent's budget, the floor is the right call until the weekly habit has survived a month.

Once it has, the edit becomes the bottleneck, and that is the one job Cutroom does: a talking take of up to 3 minutes comes back as a finished 9:16 MP4 in about a minute, every word transcribed, captions timed, footage placed on the words that need showing, all of it directed from the transcript instead of a timeline.

A batch is 100 credits and export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a 30 second video is about 110 credits. The first 3 are free in your first 7 days, with 600 credits and no card, so week one costs nothing at all; they carry a Cutroom mark. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of those, and takes the mark off. If the habit dies in week three, cancelling is one click and you lose nothing but the month.