Every few months someone posts in the forum asking what’s working for cold outreach, and the answers are always a mix of genuinely useful data points and people defending the method they’re personally committed to, whether it’s working or not. I’ve been trying to cut through that by actually asking agents about their numbers — not feelings, not what they did five years ago, but what converted in the past six months.

What follows is a compilation of what I heard from roughly 200 agents across the forum over the past quarter. I’ve kept it as close to the raw truth as I can manage.

Phone Calls Are Having a Weird Moment

Here’s something that surprised me: cold calling is working better than it was two years ago, and I think the reason is almost entirely because fewer people are doing it. The agents who’ve built systematic calling routines — actual daily dial commitments, not “I call when I have time” — are reporting pickup rates and conversion rates that would have seemed normal in 2017 but feel surprisingly strong in 2024.

The theory I heard most often: everyone shifted to digital during the pandemic and the couple of years after, and the phone got quieter. The agents who kept calling moved into a less crowded space. One agent from Phoenix told me her circle-prospecting callback rate is the best it’s been in her twelve-year career, specifically because most of her competitors stopped calling.

That said, the agents seeing results with calls are doing something specific that casual callers aren’t: they’re calling the same people repeatedly with a genuine reason each time. Market updates, just-sold notifications, price adjustments in the neighborhood — not just “are you thinking about selling?” The ones who call once and give up aren’t seeing results, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Video Voicemails: The Data Is Actually There

This came up in the forum a few weeks ago when Jenna Ramirez posted her three-month comparison of video voicemail versus traditional voicemail. Her callback rate on video voicemails was about 2.4x her standard voicemail rate. I’ve now heard similar numbers from maybe a dozen agents who’ve been systematic about it.

The catch: it only works if the video feels genuinely personal. The agents who record one generic video and blast it are getting nothing. The ones who reference the specific street, the recent sale around the corner, or something actually relevant to that person are the ones seeing callbacks. The technology creates the opportunity; the personalization is what converts it.

Text Is Complicated

Texts have high open rates and high response rates — when they work. The compliance situation has gotten significantly messier over the past year, and agents who aren’t being careful about consent documentation are taking real risks. I’m not going to get into the legal weeds here because it varies by state and situation, but if you’re running any kind of text campaign without having had a conversation with someone about compliance, that’s a conversation worth having before the FCC has it for you.

The agents who’ve figured out compliant texting are genuinely seeing strong response rates. But “genuinely seen someone in person or spoken to them on the phone first” is pretty much the floor of where you want to be before texting anyone cold.

Email: Lower Than You Think, Higher Than You’d Guess

Email to a cold list converts at rates that would make most agents embarrassed to admit they’re spending time on it. The agents who are honest about this say their cold email conversion to actual appointments is somewhere between 0.2% and 0.8%. The ones who say email is their primary lead source are almost always counting warm email — past clients, sphere, people who’ve opted in somewhere.

Where email actually works well: nurturing people who’ve already expressed some interest. As a follow-up sequence after someone registers on your site, attends an open house, or responds to any other outreach. Used that way, it’s a legitimate tool. Used as pure cold prospecting? The math is usually pretty brutal.

What Almost Nobody Talks About

The highest-converting lead source that came up in my survey is one that agents consistently undersell: existing clients they haven’t asked for referrals. The response when I bring this up in the forum is usually “well, obviously” — but then when I ask how many agents have a systematic referral-asking process, the number drops dramatically. Knowing something and doing it are different things, and the gap between them is where most of us are leaving money.

If I had to summarize the 2025 cold outreach picture: the phone is quieter than you’d expect, video adds a meaningful lift to voicemail, text works if you’ve done the compliance homework, email is for nurturing not cold prospecting, and the referral machine most agents already have is probably undertapped. None of this is revolutionary. But it’s what the data actually says.