Telemarketing in real estate works. In fact, that's what got me into the
Orlando real estate market to begin with. I used to own a telemarketing firm and after netting one of my clients over 1 million dollars in one year, I decided that the 60k profit that I made out of that million - meant that my time was being wasted.
So, here I am starting my career as a real estate agent. The best part of cold calling is that 0.1% of agents actually pick up the phone and make a cold call. Calling FSBO's and Expireds is not what I would consider cold calling. Those are already warm leads. Cold calling involves calling a target market and turning a completely cold lead into a buyer or seller lead.
In todays market however, I'm sure you would be mainly calling for buyers as opposed to listers. So cold calling will more than likely include first time homebuyers, renters, retirees in different states and those that are looking to move up into a nicer home and take advantage of the current market conditions.
There are many ways to produce leads. However, cold calling has the highest response rate out of any form of media at around 5.3% response rate and is cheaper than doing mailers. Websites are also a great way to generate leads (still lower response than cold calling), and email marketing runs second to cold calling at around 2% response (providing you are utilizing the right list).
Anyway, I'd love to hear from those looking to get into real estate telemarketing as well as those seasoned pro's that have been successfull with it. I'd be more than happy to offer advice on what techniques to use and how best to obtain lists. I've used over 400 real estate telemarketing scripts and know the market well. Even a bad cold caller can generate over 70 leads a week on 3 hours of dialing a day.