Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're kicking off the calendar year here on Real Estate Team Os in a familiar way with Lauren Bowen on lead sources and lead conversion for the third year in a row for 2026. Lauren gives you a simple process that you can do today to start improving lead conversion and ROI, the most common issues she sees in the databases of small, medium, and large size teams. Specific tech recommendations by team size, the who, what, why, and how of living in the leads and so much more. Now the SVP of Lead Generation and Lead Conversion for LPT Realty. Lauren is a thoughtful and generous expert on these topics. Get lead conversion tips with Lauren Bowen right now on real estate team os 

Speaker 2 (00:47):
No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. 

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Lauren, I don't know if you're keeping track but this is the third year in a row that you've helped us kick off a calendar year here on the show. Welcome back to Real Estate Team os. 

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Thank you. I am super excited to be back and secretly I am keeping track and I was secretly hoping you would ask me for the third year in a row because I feel like each year in this industry has been so different and I love kicking off the year with you. 

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, I so appreciate it. One of the reasons I like to do it, and by the way, just quick drive by for folks watching and listening down below, there are links to both of Lauren's previous episodes with us to kick off 2024 into kickoff 2025. That's episode 11 and episode 51 respectively. Again, linked up right down below. But one of the reasons I wanted to do this again besides that it would be kind of fun specifically it's your unique perspective agent to team lead to leader of team leaders to COO to this unique specialty in lead generation, lead conversion, lead sources, lead distribution. You just have such a unique perspective and you've been doing it on such a high level for so long that you have a lot to teach the kind of person who watches and listens to this show. 

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Well thank you. I appreciate it and I am always open to give as much value as I can because I absolutely love this community. 

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Cool. Well to kick it off, we're going to do what we've done twice now for the third time. Lauren, what's a must have characteristic of a high performing team? 

Speaker 3 (02:22):
I still really like Grace, which is my word from last year, but this one I think is a bit different. I think this year I'm going with purpose and I think that's going to be my word going into this year is purpose and it's one that's probably like what exactly do you mean by that? But when you start looking at everything you're doing, whether you're a real estate agent, whether you're a leader within the real estate community, whether you are doing things on a small scale or a large scale, is it your purpose? And then what is your purpose for others as well? What's your purpose for doing this? Is it so you can be home more with your children or is it for a purpose so you can give back to others in a greater way what was given to you? So purpose is kind of my unique word that I'm going with for this year. 

Speaker 1 (03:05):
I love it. A few things that I hear in that one is your own clarity of purpose as a filter for what you're doing, what you're not doing, why are you doing it, how are you doing it, et cetera. And then also kind of tucked under there is prioritization when so many people and things are demanding our time and attention, calling ourselves back to our own purpose is probably a good filter specifically just for that what things in what order 

Speaker 3 (03:31):
Exactly. 

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Cool. Well I gave a quick intro on your background. I won't make you restate any of it. Again, I'll send folks to episodes 11 and 51 to learn kind of how you got into the seat that you're in. But the one thing I would really like to know in this moment is when I think about a COO role and I think about your own unique specialty and again, lead gen, lead sources, lead distribution, lead conversion, it's obviously critical to the success of any real estate business. I can see how it would fall into an operational role, but so often I feel like not all the time but very much it's that function or that the decisions in the zone are certainly made in consultation with maybe whoever's running the books but it's driven so much by the team lead herself or himself or by maybe a specialized dedicated role maybe associated with agent success or this kind of a thing. How did this become your area of focus and specialty specifically as a COO of a very large organization? 

Speaker 3 (04:36):
I guess it started as when I was a team leader, I started looking at my leads very closely. If I could do this differently, I was converting a quarter of a percent more if I started this campaign or if I got this piece of technology, my conversion was going up. If I had a dynamic marketing campaign, if I brought this AI text campaign in, I was getting faster responses. So then I started helping other team leaders look at theirs as well, you don't have a consistent text campaign or a consistent even action plan running if you did that, look what it's done to my numbers. So then we kind of started collaborating and then we kind of started growing it. It's kind of how I started taking over the team leaders at that time because we started helping them with their leads and everything. So then we just started looking at them, if we can do this, what do we do this? 

Speaker 3 (05:21):
I believe it is John Chela who I heard say a small hinges swing big doors. We didn't need to get from a 2% conversion to a 6% conversion, but I did need to get from a 2% to a 2.25 because then I could work on getting to a 2.5, then I could work on getting to a 2.75. I didn't need to do a massive jump, but I needed to show improvement consistently. Even if I started getting less leads than I could get my higher conversion as long as I was working the leads and where I was proud of the conversion upon them is what I needed to do. 

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Seven, 10% improvements doubles the outcome. And by that I mean if you just break down lead conversion into seven steps, I guess crudely it's can I get initial reply, can I get on the phone? Can I set an appointment? Do they show for the appointment? If you look at all of those you just mentioned essentially a slightly more than a 10% increase from 2% to two and a quarter is just over 10%. So if you do that along the chain, you can get from two to four and eventually from four to six. I love that. Any advice to team leaders because you shared that in a team leader capacity, any advice for team leaders or ops leaders, whether that's COO, director of ops, VP ops, ops manager, whatever that is in terms of the division of labor here and the shared responsibility for driving these types of outcomes? Because some of it is very operational, but a lot of it is a sales skills, sales process, et cetera. 

Speaker 3 (06:48):
At some point, depending how large your organization is, you do need someone solely focused on leads. But a lot of times when you're just starting out it is the team leader looking at them. So I always kind of go back to the beginning and it's something I tend to repair backwards. So if I see something's not working, I work backwards to see where is it falling off and I think I've talked about that in some of the other episodes. But then also it's okay to start over every now and then. I mean I essentially did that this year and I'm sure we'll get to that, but start over here is the lead, the lead came in, what am I doing to engage with that lead? Sometimes it's when does the agent able to call it it's five minutes an hour, two hours later? Are we seeing that the agents who call within 30 seconds are converting twice as high as the agents who get to it the next day more than likely. 

Speaker 3 (07:31):
So then what happens when you grow your business? Is it time to put a call center in place? What happens to the agents who have an automatic text going out or able to do the three follow-up attempts that day? So sometimes it's just starting over from the point the lead comes in, what does it look like? Where are my successful agents at? Where are my non-successful agents at? What are they doing that is driving their conversion? So I mean sometimes even though I tend to work backwards, sometimes it is going very back to the beginning and saying what is working, what is not? 

Speaker 1 (08:01):
So there's the first actionable tip for 2026 for folks, maybe not the first one that's like this is an obvious no brainer is like when the lead comes in. And then we're also doing this maybe by source because different people are coming in in different ways from different points of relationship or expectation. But what should be happening then? 

Speaker 3 (08:25):
What 

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Is this happening? 

Speaker 3 (08:27):
I mean it's very easy to say, alright, your job is to call this lead within 10 seconds. Is that actually happening? If you realize you have 200 agents on lead flow and you're leaving it up them to call and you realize only three agents out of those 200 are actually calling within those 10 seconds. We already fixed our first problem that we need to or first problem we've identified our first problem that we need to fix. And sometimes that's what it takes. It's like, all right. And then some people don't realize sometimes stuff breaks. It's not uncommon when you start a new lead source, you're just so in the rhythm of things. You're like, did you assign an action plan to this lead source? Did you assign a text campaign? Do you have the auto nurture set up through some of your tech partners? Sometimes we just get in such a cadence we forget at the beginning we have to take these certain steps 

Speaker 1 (09:15):
Really good. So that's just essentially a mapping project. What should be happening? Is it happening and start at the beginning. And again, I'm sure there's a chain of seven things that a little 10% bump in from 3% to 3.3 can really a dramatically move things. So you mentioned starting over. We've got a couple starting over themes and you already teased one. We're going to talk a little bit about rebuilding a tech stack when you have a chance to rebuild from zero based on it, more than a decade of experience and observation and relationships in the industry. But I would love for you to talk about how you started over since we last had you on the show in 2025. 

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, last year, I mean this was not in the bingo cards at all. I think I put that in my email when I reached out to some of you. I mean I was with my previous company for 10 years. A lot of people assumed like that would be my legacy and everything for those who didn't know my father did found and start that company and everything. So they assumed his daughter would be the one taking it over. And then it was actually an event you were at and it was a chap black event. I actually had the privilege to meet Robert Palmer from LPT and I was speaking on leads there and leads are what started his funding business and he was now in the real estate community. And fast forward six months after meeting him, he was like, would you ever consider going out on your own? 

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Would you ever consider starting over? Would you ever consider going here? And it wasn't something I had thought about much because to me the previous company was my legacy. So it was something I was going to continue on. I was going to be there till the bitter end until you'd have to be bury me with my computer probably. So I started thinking about it and so Robert, my father, I talked to him and I'm like, I got presented with this opportunity and it's almost like a once in a lifetime opportunity and I don't get into religion or politics too much, but he told me, God will open the door, but it's up to you to walk through it. And he said, I think it's time for you to start your own legacy. So my previous brokerage was a well-oiled machine at that point. They have done, oh my goodness, upwards of probably 10 billion in their sales. So a couple years at 2 billion obviously with the market right now, 1.7, 1.4. They were a very well oiled machine. So I took a leap. So I took a leap and joined LPT as their, oh, I always have to read my own title. So senior director of conversion lead generation. 

Speaker 1 (11:46):
For you personally, what was interesting or attractive about the organization, not just you could create your own legacy in a wide variety of ways. And by the way, thank you for sharing that conversation with your father. Like Grace, your word from last year is all over that thing on both sides of it in any case. So you could start your own legacy over in a wide variety of different ways. So what was it about LPT and what's going on at LPT right now? 

Speaker 3 (12:17):
So obviously leads have been something I've been very passionate about for years. So LPT did come out, we don't have the rankings yet for this year, but for last year we were officially the fastest growing brokerage in the United States. So we came in 10th in transaction count for volume, and I think a lot of people forget, we were only three years old doing that. So it was officially the fastest growing brokerage out there and it was being able to talk to someone about leads that understood them like I did, but also someone who was very passionate, Robert Palmer, who was very passionate about helping his team see scale and be successful on leads. And that's really what made them different from a lot of other brokerages and brokerages that I know, like large cloud-based brokerages. I have many friends at many who are on leads themselves, but Robert is very adamant. 

Speaker 3 (13:03):
He knows what leads can do to business. He knows how well you can scale on them, but he also knows you have to be able to understand them and you have to be able to read data off of them. So his drive for wanting to see his teams grow, we say that every agent has their own definition of success. So you have the single agents who would be very happy selling three homes in the year to be able to pay for birthday presents and Christmas gifts. You have agents who want to do 10, maybe 15 deals. You have agents who want to do 30, but you also have teams that want to grow. So the team aspect of LPT was really what drew me into it, helping all these small, medium, large, get to mega teams if they want to be, but also really being able to drive it with leads and being able to be with someone who fully understand what that could do for a team itself. 

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Really good. It sounds like the foundation for a great partnership, and we're going to get into a few things you just did a drive by on, but I just want to do a quick shout out to some of the LPT team leaders that we've had on the show recently. Sam, Ian, Andrew Duncan, Marissa Rio, Keith Anderson, Jessica Boswell, Kyle Draper, and to your point, we have a lot of awesome team leaders from a lot of great companies, but we've had a lot of really good LPT folks on recently as well. And certainly all those fit into the category of folks who are either very large already or scaling quickly in some form of growth mode all in their own unique way, 

Speaker 3 (14:31):
Which I'll point out. We are in a terrible real estate market. We are talking about teams growing right now we're talking about teams aspiring to be mega teams. We're talking about teams who have doubled their production year over year, but we are actually in a terrible market right now. So to be doing that is actually unheard of, but that's something that LPT does provide them is the ability to scale and the tools to do it. So I think we forget, we're not six, seven years ago. This sucks right now 

Speaker 1 (14:59):
The types of folks that I'm engaging with on a very regular basis. I'm just calling out my own blindness or bias here. You just hit it is like I'm looking at folks that are like, yeah, our volume is up 25% and our overall units are up 27% year over year and we're looking to do that again in 2026. So I'm not going to ask you to prognosticate about the year ahead, but it is interesting that how warped my vision is. 

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yeah, I haven't gotten the year predictions right yet, so we'll just skip that one. 

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Okay. What I'd love to do right now for a team leader who's thinking about implementing a new role, I just had a recent conversation with a gentleman named Mateos and Gales on this show who forged a director of operations role in an organization that literally had not had one that had co-team leaders and the process of the three of them kind of arm wrestling it out to figure out what, there's a lot of value to be added here, but how so on behalf of a team leader or an operations leaders, anyone else that's trying to forge a new role in an organization where they know they have a unique strength and they know they can add a lot of value, I would love for you to share how it went with Robert and anyone else that you were involved with in this process of saying, I know you can be a value to this organization. I know you have unique strengths and interests. How on earth do we carve out a functional role in a dynamic fast-growing organization? Share anything about that process that you think would be helpful for folks to understand? 

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah, I think going into it when he heard me speak and everything and everything that I look at when I'm evaluating leads, lead sources and teams on leads, there are quite a few teams you just mentioned that I've actually done episodes here with Team Os. There are a lot of teams at LPT who didn't have someone directly looking at their leads. So bringing someone in who you could be like, these are all the leads sources I want, this is how much I'm spending, here's the tech I'm on. What do you think just bringing someone in to evaluate like, oh, we are losing a lot of money here. Or actually this is, you might not like this one, but it's actually your highest ROI. Bringing someone in with a fresh perspective to start with all these teams on leads because a lot of most teams are probably on some type of lead source, even people who are just generating sphere from open houses. 

Speaker 3 (17:22):
What is our follow up with them? Are we just putting them on because I treat sphere just like I treat a lead. My follow up with them is just the same. So I say leads, but sphere go right into that category. But bringing someone with a fresh set of eyes to start meeting with these large teams, these medium teams, these small teams, these solo agents who want to get to teams who are buying their own leads and being like, here it is, here's what I'm on. What do you think? And to work with them be like, oh, we're going to work on this one or actually this is going great, don't touch it. So just being able to go in and sit with them. And I think that's what a lot of large brokerages don't have is someone who can go in and just consult purely on that because leads are expensive these days and I think we've talked about that last year they didn't get any cheaper this year. 

Speaker 3 (18:04):
They definitely went up in price a little bit, but also with the market we're currently in, our friends and family are not moving right now. They are staying put unless they have to relocate, unless they need a downsize, unless there's a specific reason our friends and family pretty much have dried up. So leads are the way a lot of companies have sustained going through this tough year. I know we hoped it would've looked better than it did last year. I guess we'll probably end up about the same. There's a chance last year would've ended a little bit worse than the year before, if not flat. But leads are the way that a lot of companies were able to survive the year just being able to get people inquiries from people who needed to move, who had a purpose and everything. Because when we've been solely doing sphere and marketing to them, there's still that percentage that is, but a lot of them, they have the 2% interest rates, they have the 3% interest rates. They're like, we are bunkered down to see this out right now. 

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Yeah, a really good call. I think a variety of things here. One, I think uncertainty is the biggest X factor in general. It feels like an uncertain time at the moment and therefore I am more risk averse than I would be otherwise, even if I'm very risk tolerant on average. 

Speaker 3 (19:14):
I mean I am too. I'm in this industry and I'm like, I could probably could do with a little bit bigger house right now, but I'm a little risk averse right now. For two years we've heard that interest rates are going to come down and for the two prior years, interest rates would be ending in the fives. I don't know where we're at when this one airs, but we're not there. We haven't been there. Everyone's like, all right, we've hit the bottom. Did we hit the bottom? There's so much unknown out there at the end of last year, I guess pretty one right now. We had a large government shutdown, there were a lot of military families do you move and everything? There's talks of a 50 year mortgage coming out and I'm curious to see how that one plays out, but I don't know that that will necessarily help this industry right now. 

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Any observations from several months of consulting? I love this for you. I actually love this for LPT. If I was recruiting medium and large size teams to LPT, your name would be one of the first, I don't know, 150 words I would use in industry. That conversation of like do you want arguably the industry's best or one of the industry's best folks in your database with you on a periodic basis because that comes with this partnership as well. Absolutely. So let's start with high level regardless of team size or structure or tech stack, what are a few common questions or common problems you encounter when you start the conversation or get the first look at a spreadsheet or something? 

Speaker 3 (20:44):
So I think the one that I see the most frequently is this lead source. Let's say it's a PPC lead source. I'll look at it and I'll be like, this is actually your highest ROI. And they're like, oh, everyone hates that lead source. It takes so long to work with them. But then you actually start digging in their database and you can go in there and be like, your average attempt of phone calls is 1.1. Your average attempt on realtor.com is 7.4. Your average attempt on Zillow market based pricing is 12. Do they actually hate this lead source or are they not working this lead source? And usually with the PPC lead, you can get a lot more for what you would be paying for Zillow these days, but when we look at these PPC, they'll be like, yeah, no one really likes those. Why don't they like those? 

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Why did we ever start treating them differently? What was said did we say, oh, we're going to do a PPC to start filling up the database? What negative connotation did we start when we launched this lead source? Why would we not go into this with the same enthusiasm that we did with the other lead sources? Why did they not give this lead source seven phone calls? Why is our average one, they're not even given it a shot. And then you tell them this is your highest ROI. Yeah, you have 400 leads, you've closed four of them. Most people say that average conversion for PCs are on 1%. In reality, they would love it to be 1%. It's not. But if you are a 1% on PPC, you actually are probably very profitable on it. But then what happens when you start calling them a bit more? 

Speaker 3 (22:10):
What happens when you tell them, I want to see seven phone calls or seven call attempts on each of these leads for the next three weeks. Conversations start happening. You actually get people answering the phone. And I know in previous episodes we talked like I want this many dials, I want this many call attempts made. This year we did change a lot to conversations. I would like this many conversations by the end of the week it was taking a bit more dials. So changing the tune, like we aren't going to give it this week up until we have 35 conversations. How did that change our conversion and everything? But I think one of the things that frustrates me the most is like, yeah, that one's not any good. Is it not any good or did we not work very good? 

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean obviously the closer to bottom of funnel you are the more expensive it's going to be on the front, but it takes the least amount of work. And if I'm an agent and I'm not directly paying for any of these, I'm probably going to focus on the one that's farthest down the funnel for me. 

Speaker 3 (23:05):
And from an ops perspective, there are ways we can combat that. I'll look in some of these databases and I will look at what they consider A PPC and I'll be like, you have no tech running on it. We don't have an action plan or a text message or tech. I'm like, that's your easiest way for your agents not to be frustrated. You can easily create them a smart list and they can look at last marketing text reply. They can look for people who are texting back wanting showings. They can look at the responses to emails. They can look at the dynamic market searches. They can look that they've looked at this property 14 times. We can take a lot of this off the agents and get that negative connotation out their head by just doing works on the op side. Like, Hey here, I know you don't want to call 30 of these new leads. Let's go in and see if anyone's text back today. Let's see if anyone's responded to the email today. Let's see what the searching is like today. Because a lot of those times you get the people who are very top of funnel have made their way down, especially as we start building that database and time goes by, 

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Talk a little bit about a team of say 10 agents, a team of 20 to 30 agents, a team of 40 to 50 agents, and then maybe like that 50 plus or something. Obviously we're not going to do detailed breakdowns of all these categories, but when you think about some of the diversity in the teams by size that you've interacted with, where are the groups of people in terms of problems and opportunities? 

Speaker 3 (24:28):
So I almost feel like the small teams, they have their own set of, I mean growth affordability is going to be a small teams issue. The medium teams, I mean they don't call it messy middle for nothing. It is going to be messy just trying to figure out your systems. Once you get to the large team, you start looking at the expense of everything you got out of the messy middle, but now you're kind of expensive on everything you're running. So going into this year I was able to go in kind of with a fresh perspective when I started meeting with all these teams. They're like, all right, we don't have any tech set up. What do you recommend? And I'm like, oh, it's almost like you got to start this over and you got to say, what would I do starting this over? And then you also have people who are also relying on your expertise to guide them to make the best decision for their company and everything. 

Speaker 3 (25:13):
So a 10 person team. So I actually think I'm still surprised at the amount of people I speak to that do not utilize A CRM and that completely boggles my mind. So let's just go ahead and throw it out there in case you're CRM, you have to, I don't care if you're small, medium mega team, you have to have a CRM. So we've been with Follow-Up Boss, I mean, gosh, we've been with them since the beginning. I think Dan was working out of the Starbucks when we started with them. So we've continued in everything and then you have your leads and everything, but what is your retargeting around the leads? So there are some great tech companies that have come out there come out in the past couple of years that I think have been essential to keeping your database alive. So there's Rooster and RealScout. 

Speaker 3 (25:59):
One does go off the number of leads you have in your system and one goes off the number of people you put onto the platform. I think those are two. I will say, I don't know if I'm supposed to say, I think they're probably the closest tech that we see overlapping. I do think they're pretty good competition to each other, but it's a unique how they structure the billing for it. So depending what size team you are, you might realize it's going to be more cost effective for me to go per user than it will be to go per the size of my database. But then it's also on the flip side, it may be more cost effective for you to go for the size of your database than it is per user. So I will say I actually really like both of those tech pieces, tech companies and everything. 

Speaker 3 (26:39):
If you don't have something retargeting your database, you do want something working for you. It is taking more attempts right now to reach people. So if you call 'em on the first, second, third day and then give up, you do want something working for you on the backend. So both of those I absolutely love. They have great presidents, leaders, founders, reps within those systems. So then we start looking at text campaigns we just mentioned it takes a lot longer to engage with someone these days. So follow up Boss does allow us to send out the first text, maybe the one day they'll allow us to do multiple. Just throwing that out there. I've already told them this, but a text campaign is important as well. But a good text campaign is even more important. We all get spammed 30,000 text messages a day right now. 

Speaker 3 (27:26):
I think I get about 12 a day with health insurance alone. But also how do you not get one that sounds spammy? How do you make sure you get a re-engagement to yours? How do you make sure you get a response to yours? So making sure you have a good text campaign and there are some really good ones out there right now. So call Action probably has one of the most dynamic and diverse text campaigns that you can utilize. But there's also Lead Engage texting Betty. Now each of these, depending on if you're a 10, 20 or 50 size team, the cost is different for each of these. So depending where you stand might be the determining factor. You may love everything Call Action has, but you're just not quite there yet to pull the trigger cost-wise where texting Betty might be the better option for you or lead Engage might be if you're in the middle. 

Speaker 3 (28:13):
So you really have to determine what is the problem I'm facing? What can I afford to do? Because when you're a small team, you are looking at every dime very closely and what's going to get you the most benefit out of it If you're a large team, like you have a database, once you have these teams come on, these agents putting in their sphere, are you retargeting to your past clients? Fellow has been a really big mover in our database, being able to see people who have multiple properties, being able to see the value, taking them down the journey. If they're looking for a cash offer, maybe talking to someone to list their property, now it's adding another piece of tech in. Do I do it if I'm a smaller medium sized teams? I think we have to determine what that, if I'm under probably about 30 agents, I don't know that I bring it on just yet. 

Speaker 3 (28:57):
There is something I also feel like in this industry we get very attracted to the next shiny object and I think sometimes we can get tech overload and when your agents, I think you want to be very careful of the white noise that can occur. So when you have too much white noise going on, they're spending too much time on the tech and not enough time on just genuinely working the leads. So if you're a large size team, I would definitely say take a look at fellow, there's some good accountability tools coming out right now. So Shiloh and Maverick re are really think again probably for the larger size teams, small and medium, make sure you just get through growing and everything. So I don't know if I was a 10, 20, 30 person team, but again, it also could be they aren't being able to grow because they don't have the accountability in place. 

Speaker 3 (29:45):
So I don't want to say no, don't look at them if you're small or medium because it might be exactly what you're missing. And then House Whisperer came out last year and I actually love that It's like ai, it's a your own personal AI assistant and everything. And that one's come a really long way in the past year probably. I joke with Lewis that his AI hung up on me the first time I used it and I'm like, can we make her a bit nicer? I'm using please and thank you. Said she hung up on me. So he was like, oh my gosh. But it's like your own AI assistant so you can talk to it and it'll parse everything and follow up Boss for you. It will put your appointments and appointments, your notes and notes. It sets your next task. And I think for real estate agents, and that would be a tool I would probably say is beneficial for small, medium, large size real estate agents are on the road a lot. 

Speaker 3 (30:37):
We are constantly between inspections, appraisals, showings. So what happens if the first client of the day says, can you email me more like this? And then you go to show two other people when you get home you're probably focused on client number three. They're the freshest in your memory. Do you remember exactly what client number one of the day said to you? Probably not. But on that drive had you called House Whisperer and told your assistant to set a task or a reminder for you, it is already there and done. You already have that note in there. You didn't have to log on to anything. Your assistant that you dialed into already took care of it for you and made sure that you didn't forget about that. So that's a piece of tech I would say I think any size team can scale and grow with. 

Speaker 1 (31:18):
Okay, really, really well done. 

Speaker 3 (31:20):
I really love tech. Can you tell me, 

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, you covered team sizes, you dropped a bunch of stuff. I'm going to turn this into a question, but a quick promotional plug if you missed TechT on real estate team os we turned September into eptember on real estate team os Julia o' Buckley, our ops manager with the Lawton team in Phoenix spoke at length about how her team uses House Whisper in particular and also talked about, I'm just kind of turning some of your observations here into a tip. When we start creating a slightly complex tech environment for agents, just like with lead sources, they're going to bias us toward one over another and maybe not give an appropriate piece, a useful piece of tech, the amount of attention that they should. And so she talked a little bit about too about how she's relaunching the four main tools in their tech stack. One of them is fellow by the way, and Ryan Young from fellow is also in that tech temper series. So I'll link that up down below. Living in the leads 

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Is 

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Something that I've heard you say many times. When you say living in the leads, what does that mean to you? Certainly if you have an ISA function, there's a lot of that there. There's an agent responsibility, there's probably a team leader in an operations opportunity or even responsibility there as well. Talk a little bit about living in the leads, what does it mean and who should be living in the leads? 

Speaker 3 (32:37):
I think that really depends on what size you are. When you get to a large team, if you have a hundred plus agents on leads, you probably need a me, someone living in your leads full time, especially if you're purchasing those, even if they're referral phase. Zillow Flex has a lot of requirements that you have to follow. So you almost need to make sure you do have someone at that size, medium and small teams that probably is the team leader living in them. And trust me, I get it's probably something you want to dedicate one to two hours out of a day. As a team leader you have multiple functions including coaching, you have call grading that you want to do. Living in the leads is something you probably need to do on a daily basis though it is what I did and that's really what helped move the needle upon our teams and everything. 

Speaker 3 (33:19):
So I mean that's throwing it back to my team lead years and everything, but it is what scaled it was living in them. I say living in them and I actually live in them in FA lot of the time and it gives us the capability too. So I can go into reporting and some of the stuff I look at when I go in there is how many leads did they receive this week? How many did they receive this month? Where are they year to date on it? And it's actually something that I'm surprised more people don't look at on a consistent basis because we are able to set up our group and our routing. I personally like round robin for most of our lead sources. You have Zillow where they call into you and stuff like that, but most of the other lead sources are email inquiries. 

Speaker 3 (33:58):
We have a few more that have expanded this year. Market VIP we're probably 50% email leads versus live handoffs. But when you're looking at agents reporting, you notice sometimes this person got two leads, this got person got 45 leads, these two groups are right next to each other. I now have someone who's cherry picking and someone who's probably waiting for the next one to come in. So the amount of leads that agents receive is huge. And I think we've talked about lead counts in some of the other episodes and everything, but once you start hitting the 2030, if you've hit that in the month halfway through, we really need to start pausing them and utilizing that to make sure everyone is getting worked appropriately. But then even just looking at maybe initially assigned leads, because sometimes our agents, if they have the ability to put them in ponds, think maybe a lead shouldn't be theirs and can send 'em to the pond or reassign to a team leader. 

Speaker 3 (34:50):
How many did they actually get? Because I know I would hear sometimes I only got three leads this month, you actually got nine, you just didn't get ahold of six of them on the first phone call and sent it to the pond, which is not what you do. So some of those things you can actually see within the reporting and I love that. I also really like to target at the top of the reporting. You can see when the leads come in. I love doing that probably. I know we've addressed my problem with spreadsheets and my problem with data, the happiness it brings me, my face lights up, I have five dogs and I don't know that my face lights up this much when I talk about them, but spreadsheets definitely. But I like seeing the graph because I like seeing on weekends we have doubled the lead count that we did than we did during the week. 

Speaker 3 (35:33):
I like seeing that at the end of the month I can expect a 20% higher lead count. I like knowing the day after our major holiday or on a major holiday, sometimes I'm through the roof. So this helps me project where I need my agents to be going into the seventh of the month, the 15th of the month, the 21st of the month. You can do it different ways. If you look on the 10th, you know, probably want them to have 10 leads if they have two, we have a problem. If you look at it on the seventh and they have 12 leads, well if we're only one week out of four, they're going to end a little high. So some people are like, how do we combat that? Leads have not been the issue. It's typically not having enough agents is the issue right now. 

Speaker 3 (36:12):
And I don't blame anybody for that. We talk about sharpening our recruiting skills. It's not been a great market for a couple of years. So agents have left the industry to find more stable work and everything. And I think that's part of also why I took this position. I have talked in the past, I think with you Ethan, I want to bring stability to this industry. I want to be able for people to be like, I can make this my career. I don't want them to have to worry about when their next check is. So if I can give them the tools, the leads and kind of the play by play to be able to achieve that, I really want to just because this industry has given so much to me and my family, it's let me raise my two little ones and make sure I'm there for every basketball game and every basketball practice or the first day of school. I want people to be able to have the freedom that I know this industry can afford to them. We've gone sidelined. All right, let's go back to leads. We went down a rabbit hole. 

Speaker 1 (37:04):
No, no, no, it is really good. It's funny here. I do remember your love of spreadsheets. That was episode 11. And honestly when you said I thought they might bury me with my laptop, I was like with Google Sheets or acceleration. I know 

Speaker 3 (37:17):
It's so true. But yeah, I love looking at that stuff and follow up boss because also we can look at the number of call attempts. I love being able to toggle between the agents and keep track like so-and-so makes six call attempts. I love to be able to pull up a team when I go in and talk with them and say, they can say who I'm like, let me guess who your top three performers are. And I guarantee it's the people who have the highest phone calls, highest text messages, highest email. I have never gone on a meeting where they've said my top performers, the person owes zero across the board. It doesn't happen. The work works. So I love going on there and seeing if you can show this to your team and be like, you guys received the same amount of leads but they've done five times more calls, they've sent the text, they've done batch emails, they also closed four homes last year or four homes last month and you did one. 

Speaker 3 (38:06):
If you did an hour more each day of intentional outreach, what would that look like for you? This is what it potentially could look like. So I love just looking at all the numbers that we're able to see in F and toggle between the teams and man, this sounds like a F plug and I'm not meaning it to, but really I do most of my data research out a follow-up boss. We do say if it is not in follow-up boss, it didn't happen. So I do pull all of my data out there, the number of calls they make, the leads they get month over month. You can create data with that too, which is something I do. But I can tell you every December we're going to drop off this much, but every January we're going to go off this much. So it lets me kind of have predictive analytics of what I can go into the next year and I can advise the teams on this historically happens even certain markets and everything we can tell. But yeah, I do pull all of my data out of hub. 

Speaker 1 (38:54):
I want to round up here for a team leader who's starting 2026, we are looking at lead sources and making sure that all lead sources are being treated appropriately and that we're minimizing cherry picking. I think I heard you on living in the leads. Let's just assume that it's a team leader who doesn't have a dedicated person and no one really has been living in the leads. This should be a weekly practice. It could maybe start small. You're going to start to understand what you're looking at by making it a habit time blocking it and honoring the time block is probably how I would approach this if I haven't been living in the leads. You get to know it, you get to know it relative to your business and then you start focusing on things that you can maybe start pulling custom reports on or start assigning to somebody else because you understand it well enough that now you need to look at this, contact these people about these things and let me know about this other thing. But it's that process of just starting the habit of getting in there and seeing what's there where you start to realize what the problems are and start coming up with solutions. Is it that simple or am I oversimplifying? 

Speaker 3 (39:58):
I really think it's that simple and we'll go back to, I think hearing John say that it was probably one of the most, and it was actually at, so I'm thinking about now, it was actually at Fcon that I heard John speak for the first time. I'm not one of his coaches. I don't coach. I know I'm plugging all of these tech companies and all these people, they're friends of mine throughout the industry right now. I don't get anything for coming on here and saying use their company. And I do want to say that because I think sometimes we go to people for advice but not realizing they do 

Speaker 1 (40:27):
Make they have a financial incentive. There's a lot of that and a lot of it is not forthright. 

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Correct. And so I want to be very clear on that. I genuinely have used these companies and I have found success in them. There are some I didn't mention that I mentioned in previous years that I don't use anymore because they don't fit where I need them to fit right now. And I do have, it's like a love hate relationship. I know you work for them, but is it the best for me and my team right now? And I want to know that candidly. And I love the ones who are always open and honest about it. But going back to the question John, him saying small hinges swing big doors. I would always just, I think I probably mudder myself that to myself and sound like a crazy person as I'm going through because I'm like, this might get me five or six more closings for this team. 

Speaker 3 (41:14):
But if they're doing 50 or 60 in a month, that's a 10% increase for them. But I'm just like small hinges swing big doors, small hinges, swing big doors. And I just sit there telling that to myself as I'm pulling the data because it is so true because month over month doing that, it makes a huge difference in your business. So it was something like I would always just like as I'm typing along, pulling the data, I'm like small hinges swing big doors. And I would just keep telling myself that because I know if I consistently did the work, it would show itself and it did. 

Speaker 1 (41:42):
Gosh, you just keep teeing me up for these reference points. In addition to episodes 11 and 51, John was one of our guests in the Fcon sessions. That was the first 21 episodes I recorded of the show. So those are all released two years. 

Speaker 1 (41:56):
And John is also my guest on the very next episode. If you're listening to more here in the beginning of January, John is up on this coming Tuesday. And if you're listening to this later, well it's just the next episode ahead in the feed. What is something, Lauren, as I kind of put a little bit of a button on this lead generation lead conversion, it's what you're focused on all of the time. What are a couple of things that come to mind that have never changed in your decade plus in the industry? And what are a couple of things that are emerging or changing? I mean you already referenced the nature of the market. I think 4 million homes is this kind of zone that we've been in, which we haven't seen since the mid nineties ish. So maybe in light of that again, what has never changed in these zones that you're spending most of your attention in and consulting in and what are a few things that are emerging or that should be revisited that aren't necessarily the norm right now? 

Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah, what's never changed is that work works. We talk, there are very many teams who are having their best year ever. There are teams who have grown year over year in terrible markets. I mean, I know some of these team leaders, I don't think they were born the last time the market was this bad. Some of these are in their early thirties and I am like, you weren't even alive the last time this market was that bad. I'm going to go with that on that age too. So we'll go with that. I wasn't born for that either. But that work works. They're consistently doing, they're doing call nights with their agents. They're making sure the dials are done. We may have changed the conversation from dials to conversations, but the work is consistently being done. They're not sitting back and taking the excuses is a terrible market. 

Speaker 3 (43:37):
No one's buying and letting that defeat that. So the work works, the consistency works, but it's also, I think people, I am guilty. I love watching selling Sunset. I like watching all that on tv, but I think people think it's a very glamorous profession that we're in. And at some areas, I mean we do have some luxury out there that I'm constantly in awe of over at Aperture and I'm just like, oh my goodness, look at that home. But also the boring is what gets you to the closing. Sitting here making a phone, 20 phone calls every hour. It's not very glamorous sitting here doing your follow-up attempts and seeing what you can do. It's, there's no TV that's going to come in and record me doing consistent. No one that's going to come in with a camera and be like, oh my goodness, you starting over these action plans is amazing. 

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Let's get this on film. It's boring and it's time consuming and it's one of those things, it does pay off though. It needs to be done. And the boring is what gets you to the closing. And I think a lot of people tend to forget that the harder it gets, but it's just like stay consistent. This market is not going to stay like this forever. It can't. There's too much pent up home demand. I'm curious to see where we end with the 50 year mortgage. I have my own thoughts and opinions on that. Do I think it can help all that? It will be determined. I'm curious to see when this episode drops where we end on that. But at the same time, if you're doing the work, I have yet to hear and talk to someone who said, I'm having 35 conversations a week and I haven't had a closing in three months. I have yet to hear someone who's putting in the work that has not been successful this year, or at least maintained where they were. 

Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah, I hear that as professionalism, dedication. So it's not just like grind. It's like this actually is the job. This actually is the work 

Speaker 3 (45:24):
And 

Speaker 1 (45:24):
That's what the professional does. 

Speaker 3 (45:26):
Yes. I mean no matter what job you have, there are seasons where it's going to get hard. I mean, I don't care what you do. We talked like I came out of the healthcare professional. Sure enough, holidays we're twice as busy as any other. 4th of July in Florida is never a good thing when you're working in the ER or so, we always have a few fingers and everything, but I mean it's tax season for accountants. There are trying seasons. Our season has just lasted a little bit longer. But at the same time, it's when we needed to buckle down, do the work and show we are professionals and we actually, I love all these conversations. You and I have Ethan, because every time I go back to it, I'm like, oh, I talked to you about it, Ethan. But this industry always hasn't had the best reputation and there are so many great professionals in this industry now. I'm like, I know when my children grow up. I know it's not going to have the same reputation it did when I went into it because there's so many team leaders, brokers, so many visionaries out there who are determined to have a change in everything. So I'm excited for the future of it. 

Speaker 1 (46:24):
Me too. There are, especially for the folks who are a, willing to do the work and put in muscle out that part of it. But then B, the theme that you've been talking about quite a bit that isn't like no mystery to anybody is that consumers are in a challenging time as well. And so meeting them where they are in these conversations. So when you are making those call attempts and you make that connection, how do you turn that into a productive conversation? The folks that are willing to be, I know a lot of people have different opinions about this word, but truly empathetic and curious about where they are, what's going on with them. That's the way that we move people is we move people when and how it makes sense to them, not simply through muscling them into making a decision we want for them 

Speaker 3 (47:12):
And we definitely thinned the hurt this year when it came to realtors and everything, and I can't say that I'm upset about that. I think we had a lot of people into this industry. When things are easy, those who have stuck with it, I feel like I'm truly honored to work alongside them. I follow some of 'em on Facebook and I see everything they're doing to get these clients into their homes and everything, and I'm so proud to just be reading it and know they're within my company, outside the company. I have tons of friends outside of our brokerage that I'm like, that's amazing. I feel like the empathy that agents have these days is more than that they ever have because they've seen the past couple of years of this market and what it's take to endure it and not just our side from people trying to buy and sell a house side. 

Speaker 1 (47:50):
We could obviously go for another hour, but I don't have that on your calendar. So I'm going to go straight to my three pairs of closing questions, which you've already done twice. 

Speaker 3 (47:59):
Oh my goodness. I forgot about those. 

Speaker 1 (48:01):
Feel free to do whatever you want to do with these. What is your very favorite team to root for, or what is the best team you've ever been a member of? 

Speaker 3 (48:09):
So I'll go sports again this year. So my kids are super into basketball right now, so Orlando Magic, we'll go with our home team. I think we typically sit on the opposing team side, so we get to see the other players, but we'll go with Orlando Magic. So we've grown pretty close to watching them, so we go and root them on whenever we can. 

Speaker 1 (48:25):
Really good. I have adopted them as well as one of my five-ish favorite teams because they have a bunch of University of Michigan guys. Oh, 

Speaker 3 (48:32):
Nice. 

Speaker 1 (48:32):
What is one of your most frivolous purchases, or what's a cheapskate habit you hold on to? 

Speaker 3 (48:38):
I think we talked about my chickens being my cheap habit at one time. They're going to be my frivolous purchase now. I have a bunch of freeloaders out there who are not laying me any type of eggs and haven't for months at time. They are just taking up decorative space outside. So my cheapskate habit have become my expensive hobby now. 

Speaker 1 (48:57):
That's really funny. As long as they're living a good life, 

Speaker 3 (49:00):
They are. They're their best life out there, 

Speaker 1 (49:02):
I'm sure. What does it look like for you to invest your time in learning, growing and developing, or what does it look like? What are you doing when you're investing time in resting, relaxing and recharging? 

Speaker 3 (49:12):
I don't know what the other one looks like. The latter one of relaxing is not something I've done much of this year. I will say I did put my priorities pretty hard set this year though, starting something new. I did prioritize. My kids are very important to me. My fiance is very important to me, my family, my friends, but also realizing work is very important, especially when you're starting something like for a company ground up. You almost have to prioritize that. So being with people who understand that, learn, grow, develop. I will say I've probably done more of this year than any other year. At my previous brokerage. We were new. We had four agents when we started, we grew to a thousand. We've talked about that in the previous episodes, but now I kind of went with fresh eyes. So I've done a lot of learning and development. 

Speaker 3 (49:54):
I actually genuinely enjoy reading books, foldable once, not on the Kindle and everything. I started listening to podcasts. My fiance is always listening to them, so now I listen to them as a result of it and everything. I love hearing other people's take on what's going on and not just with the housing but with government right now, with housing right now, with finances right now and stuff. Because going able to talk to all these teams within LPT, it's like I do want to bring value to each of them to swing those big doors if that's what they dream to do, but how can I do that? Leads are obviously a strong point, but I want them to be able to like, I can't help you with this, but I've heard this podcast that you might want to listen to. So podcasts and books have probably been a big thing this year for me. 

Speaker 1 (50:36):
Awesome. Same. That's just what a professional does. If I'm going to be raking the yard or shoveling snow or clearing the dishwasher, I'm listening and learning all the time so I can be of more value to the people around me. Absolutely. Lauren, you are a gift. I appreciate you spending this time with me again. To kick off 2026, if someone wants to connect with you, learn more about you, keep track of what you're up to, where would you send them? 

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Yeah, honestly, I actually love hearing y'all's responses and everything and I love getting your emails and I will always hop on anytime I can with you. So Lauren dot Bowen, B-O-W-E-N, at l pt.com, and my cell phone's (352) 843-3434. I love hearing the text messages or seeing if I can come in and help. If you guys need help with leads or want to fresh perspective, I've made a lot of mistakes in this industry. I try and prevent people from doing the same. So if you guys ever need anything, feel free to reach out. 

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Super generous. I appreciate you so much, Lauren. I hope you have a great 2026 ahead and I hope to see you in person again. 

Speaker 3 (51:37):
Thank you. I do too. 

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.