TL;DR: The Warm List Revolution: Adam Joske has cracked the code on what he calls “the biggest hole in our business” – that critical 6-month to 2-year nurturing period where he says 90% of agents disappear just when prospects are getting serious.
The Agent Who Beat the Presenters by Playing the Long Game
Adam Joske discovered his superpower completely by accident. For years, he kept running up against a competitor who was genuinely brilliant in the lounge room. When it came to immediate listings, Adam reckoned their success rate was about 50-50. But whenever a prospect said they’d sell in 12 months, Adam says he knew he’d win every single time.
“He was a typical real estate agent where he’d call and chase for three, four months – he’s on the phone, he’s pushing, he’s sending stuff, and then it’s almost like at the four-month mark, he just disappears,” Adam explains. “Most agents that I work with disappear in that period, and they never speak to the client again.”
This revelation became the foundation of a 30-year career that saw Adam win REIV Residential Salesperson of the Year in 2015 and consistently break records through what others dismissed as old-fashioned relationship building. But Adam calls it something else entirely: systematic client nurturing with military precision.
What Marcus and countless other agents were missing wasn’t presentation skills or market knowledge – it was the patience and systems to play where it really counts: that warm zone where prospects are thinking seriously but not ready to move immediately.
The Three-Zone Database: Why Most Agents Get It Backwards
Most agents understand hot and cold leads, but Adam discovered they’re completely misunderstanding where the real opportunities live. His breakthrough came from recognising three distinct zones in every database:
The Hot Chase List (0-6 months): These are your immediate opportunities – maybe 20 or 30 people who’ll transact soon.
“Some people are okay with long-term database management,” Adam notes, “but I think where the opportunity is, is that warm list.”
The Warm List (6 months to 2 years): This is where the magic happens and where 90 of agents drop off.
“If you haven’t got a follow-up system and you know they’re not selling, it’s kind of a waste of time,” Adam says. “You’re just hoping they’ll remember you, and most of the time they don’t.”
The Cold Database (2+ years out): Your long-term relationship building exercise.
The counterintuitive truth? That warm zone – where prospects have expressed genuine intent but need time – is where fortunes are made.
“Agents that I’ve worked with have doubled or tripled their business without doing any more work” by mastering this period, Adam reveals.
The 4,000-Contact Database: How Accuracy Beats Volume
When Adam talks about his legendary database system, the first thing is that it’s not about size – it’s about precision. 90% accuracy across 4,000 contacts isn’t just impressive; it’s the foundation of everything that followed.
“I really categorised and tagged every single person in there,” Adam explains. “Literally went house by house by house and said, okay, is this a weatherboard home? Is it a brick home? Put the land size in, beds, bathrooms, cars.”
But here’s what separates Adam’s approach from the usual.
“For me, blanket marketing is the easiest way to get people to unsubscribe. I’m a firm believer that if you send people relevant information that’s relevant for them, they’ll be interested in it, they’ll engage in it, they’ll remember you when they’re gonna sell or move.”
Rather than sending a $2 million two-storey townhouse listing to someone with a $400,000 apartment, Adam would filter.
“Let’s send an EDM to only people who live in townhouses, and only those people who have minimum three bedrooms and two car parks, and it needs to be two-storey.”
The result? Instead of annoying 3,000 people with irrelevant content, he’d send highly targeted communication to maybe 200 people who actually cared.
“Those 200 appreciate it. Those 200 respond. We start a dialogue together, it builds the relationship.”
The A-AA-AAA-Advocate System: Relationship Categorisation That Actually Works
This might be Adam’s most brilliant insight: relationship strength matters more than transaction timing. While most agents obsess over when someone might sell, Adam focused on how strong his relationship was with each contact.
“I categorise them either as an A, AA, AAA, or advocate,” Adam explains.
Here’s how the system works:
Advocates (50 out of 4,000):
“My best friends, my closest people, my solicitor, my accountants, people who I’m very close with. If I was to have a function and 50 people are getting invited to this function that costs a lot of money, these are the people that get invited.”
AAA (About 10% of database): People of influence or those who’ve had multiple transactions.
“If Sam, for instance, you’re a person of high influence who I want to nurture on a high level, and you are a person of influence in our industry, I might categorise you as an advocate or a AAA.”
AA and A: Progressively weaker relationships, but still valuable connections.
The communication strategy varied dramatically by category. Advocates and AAAs received high-quality, printed market reports on thick gloss paper. AAs got the same report on slightly cheaper paper. As and some AAs received email or SMS versions.
“I can’t afford the time nor the money to be able to post to every single person, 4,000 people every single month,” Adam notes. “So once we categorise the different relationships, we can communicate with them differently.”
This system generated business outside his patch.
“30% of my listings were within my patch, but 70-80% of the listings I got were outside of the patch, but because of the patch.”
The relationship strength drove referrals and repeat business far beyond geographical boundaries.
Why Market Reports Beat Beef Stroganoff And Why Your Database Is A Media Asset
Adam’s approach to content creation is refreshingly anti-fluff. While the industry obsesses over personality-driven newsletters filled with recipes and birthday announcements, Adam focused ruthlessly on what people actually wanted: information.
“I believe rightly or wrongly, but my belief is that people just wanna know facts and figures and stats and graphs and where their property sits in comparison to what’s going on out there,” he says bluntly.
His monthly market reports included:
- All sales for the suburb for the past month
- Visual data through graphs and statistics
- Year-on-year comparisons
- Clear, numbers-oriented insights
“I don’t believe in newsletters that say, ‘Welcome Joan, our new receptionist to our office.’ I personally don’t believe that the public care,” Adam continues. “We’re not rock stars, we’re just business people. We’re not celebrities. I don’t think we’re that interesting.”
The AI revolution has made this approach even more powerful. Adam demonstrated this recently:
“I went to realestate.com.au and I put Elsternwick in there and asked for an Elsternwick snapshot. I literally cut and pasted that information, put it into ChatGPT, and said, ‘Give me a full market report on Elsternwick. I only want it 500 words long. Don’t make it look like AI has done it.’ It gave me the best market report in about five minutes.”
But here’s a really exceptional move: getting local businesses to sponsor these reports.
“Because we had such high-quality data and had 90% of the suburb in there, we would then go to a new business, a new café, saying, ‘How would you like us to promote your business across every single Elsternwick resident?’ They’d say, ‘Yeah, absolutely, no brainer.'”
The sponsorship often covered the entire cost of the newsletter production, turning a marketing expense into a revenue-neutral or even profitable exercise.
Ready to transform your database into your biggest business asset?
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Connect with Adam Joske
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjoske/
Resources Mentioned
- ChatGPT – AI assistant for content creation and analysis (http://openai.com/chatgpt)
- Cotality (formerly CoreLogic Australia) – Property data and analytics provider (https://www.cotality.com)
Connect with Samantha McLean
Join the Conversation
What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to nurturing your “warm list”? Have you ever lost a listing because you didn’t follow up long enough? What’s one creative way you’ve kept your database engaged without spamming them?
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