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Lead Reactivation · Logan Bates

How Many Old Leads Do You Actually Have? (A Back-of-the-Envelope Method)

Most agents cannot say how many dormant leads are sitting in their database. Here is a back-of-the-envelope estimate based on career sales, why the multiplier moves depending on how you got your business, and what to filter for in your CRM to replace the guess with a real count.

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Ask an agent how many dormant leads they are sitting on and you will almost always get a number with a question mark at the end of it. “A couple thousand? Maybe more?” Ask them to bet money on it and the number moves by a factor of three in either direction.

That vagueness has a cost. The size of your dormant database is the one input that decides whether working it deserves a week of your attention or five minutes of guilt. If the honest answer is 180 contacts, you can work them by hand on a slow Tuesday. If it is 4,000, doing it by hand is not a plan, and you need to decide something else. You cannot make that call on “a couple thousand? maybe more?”

This post is a way to get to a defensible number in about ninety seconds, without exporting anything. Then, at the end, what to actually filter for when you do open the CRM, because the estimate is only there to hold you over until you have a real count.

Why nobody knows their own number

The reason agents cannot answer this is not carelessness. It is that almost nobody’s database lives in one place.

A typical working agent’s contacts are spread across:

  • The current CRM, which only contains what somebody remembered to import
  • Their phone, which has hundreds of numbers attached to first names and no context
  • Old spreadsheets, usually one per campaign, usually in a Downloads folder
  • A previous brokerage’s system, which they may no longer have a login for
  • An email marketing tool with a list nobody has touched since the last market shift
  • Paper. Open house sheets in a drawer, business cards in a desk

The CRM number, the one an agent would quote you if pushed, is usually the smallest of those. It reflects the contacts that survived a migration, not the contacts that exist. So the instinct to say “no idea” is actually the correct instinct. It is just not a usable one.

For why those contacts went quiet in the first place, which is a different question with a more interesting answer, see why real estate leads really go cold.

The estimate: career sales times 8 to 15

Here is the rule of thumb I use.

Your dormant lead count is roughly your career sales multiplied by 8 to 15.

Before you do anything with that, an important caveat about where it comes from. This is my own rule of thumb, drawn from what I see when agents actually export their databases and we compare it to what they told me beforehand. It is not a researched industry figure. There is no study behind it, no dataset I can point you to, and I am not going to dress it up as one. It is a starting guess that tends to land in the right neighborhood, and its entire job is to be replaced by a real count. If your own export contradicts it, believe the export and ignore me.

With that said, here is how to place yourself in the range.

Where your business came from moves the multiplier more than anything else. An agent who has spent years buying portal leads sits at the top of the range, 15 or higher. That is the whole point of paid lead generation: you buy a large volume of inquiries and convert a small fraction of them. The ones you did not convert did not evaporate. They are still in the system, and there are a lot of them relative to your sales count. An agent whose business is referral and sphere driven sits closer to 8, sometimes below it, because comparatively few strangers ever entered their database at all. Their contacts are people they know, and the ratio of inquiries to relationships is much tighter.

For long-career agents, tenure matters more than sales count. Twenty years of accumulated inquiries is a bigger list than a high sales count compiled over five years, even when the five-year agent has sold more. Time in the business means more market cycles, more campaigns, more brokerages, more forms filled out by people who then went quiet. If you have been doing this a long time, push your estimate up regardless of where your sales number lands.

Teams multiply it. Every agent who joined brought their own book with them, and most of those books were never merged, deduplicated, or worked as a single asset. For a team, run the estimate per agent and add them together. The number usually surprises the team lead more than it surprises anyone else.

Then add the sources almost everyone forgets. These sit outside the CRM and outside the estimate:

  • Open house sign-ins, which are often the single largest forgotten pool
  • Expired and FSBO lists you worked, including the ones you worked for a month and abandoned
  • Past clients from before your current CRM, who frequently did not survive the migration
  • Anyone who inquired about financing, if you have ever done mortgage work or partnered closely with a lender

Any one of those can add hundreds of contacts that the career-sales multiplier will not capture, because they never resulted in a transaction and so were never counted against your sales number.

Finding yourself in the range

A few worked examples, so you can locate the shape closest to yours. These are ranges on purpose. Anyone quoting you a single figure for this is guessing with more confidence than the method supports.

Newer agent, three years in, around 12 sales, mostly sphere and referral. Roughly 100 to 200 dormant contacts. Low multiplier, short tenure. This is a database you can genuinely work by hand, and you probably should before you spend money on anything.

Mid-career agent, eight years in, around 60 sales, mixed portal spend and referral. Roughly 500 to 900. This is the range where working it by hand starts to break down somewhere in week two, which is the failure mode described in the 30-day database reactivation plan.

Portal-heavy producer, six years in, around 90 sales, sustained Zillow and Realtor.com spend. Roughly 1,300 to 1,500, quite possibly more. High multiplier because the entire model depends on buying far more inquiries than you convert. If this is you, the gap between what you have paid for and what you have worked is the real story, and the head-to-head on portal spend versus your own database is the relevant comparison.

Twenty-year veteran, around 200 sales, referral-driven, two brokerage changes along the way. Roughly 1,600 to 3,000, and realistically more once the old spreadsheets and the previous brokerage’s export surface. Low multiplier, but tenure overwhelms it. The brokerage changes are the wildcard here, because each one tends to strand a chunk of the database somewhere you no longer log in.

Five-agent team. Run each agent separately and sum. A team of five mid-career agents is plausibly in five figures before anyone has gone looking for the open house binders.

What to count when you open the CRM

The estimate is a placeholder. Here is how to replace it with something real, in one sitting.

Filter your CRM for contacts where all of the following are true:

  1. No activity in 12 or more months. No calls, no texts, no emails, no notes. Twelve months is the useful cutoff because it clears anyone in a normal follow-up rhythm. If your CRM makes this hard, sort by last-contacted date and scroll to where the dates get old.
  2. There is a phone number attached. An email-only contact is not reachable by text, so it does not belong in a texting count. This is also the filter that usually shrinks the number the most, and it is better to know that now.
  3. Exclude current clients and anyone in an active transaction. Obvious, but worth doing deliberately rather than assuming your filters caught it.
  4. Exclude anyone who has opted out or landed on a do-not-contact list. Non-negotiable, and worth reading the compliance ground rules before you touch any of these contacts.
  5. Deduplicate. Most databases that have survived a migration carry a meaningful number of doubles, and the same person under two spellings inflates your count and, worse, gets messaged twice.

Then go get the contacts that are not in the CRM at all: the old spreadsheets, the previous brokerage export if you can still request it, the phone contacts you can identify, the open house sheets. Those are the ones that make the real number diverge from the estimate, almost always upward.

Once you have the filtered number, you have replaced a guess with an asset you can make decisions about. If you want a view on which of those contacts are worth working first, not every dormant source reactivates equally well.

Why the number matters at all

Because it is the input for a single decision: is this worth a week of attention, or is it not?

Here is what we see when a dormant list actually gets texted. About 9% of a dormant list replies. That counts every reply, including the people telling us they already sold, that it is the wrong number, or to stop. About 1 in 90 of the leads we can actually reach turns into a qualified conversation, meaning someone who replies, answers questions about what they are looking for, and gets handed to you.

Two rates, same population, so you can compare them directly. Run them against your own estimate and you will see immediately why the count matters. A 200-contact database and a 3,000-contact database are not the same decision, and the difference is not one of degree.

As a concrete instance rather than an average across customers, here is the one we publish. One agent’s dormant database averaged 12 qualified buyers and sellers a month while the campaign was sending. That is a single account, and it is deliberately stated against the period the campaign was actually sending rather than any longer stretch, because a rate that keeps getting quoted after the sending stopped is not a rate, it is a memory.

We are quoting replies and qualified conversations, not closings, because conversations are what we can evidence today. If anyone in this category quotes you deals closed off a reactivation campaign, ask them for the count and the window before you believe it.

There is one more reason the count is worth getting right. Klosed charges $1 per reachable lead, charged once at upload, and the reachable count is exactly the number described above: the contacts with a live number, after the dead numbers, missing numbers and junk entries come out. You see that count before you are charged anything, so the estimate in this post is not what you pay against. It is just what tells you whether to bother looking.

Logan Bates, Founder, Klosed