Seven weeks into a new job at a real estate data company, and the thing I keep hearing is that prospecting is harder than it used to be.
The market. The competition. Nobody picks up the phone anymore.
And then I look at Diego Traglia selling a property every 48 hours.
Are we talking about the same industry?
That question is what drove us to bring Diego and Tom Panos together for a webinar.
Not to talk about AI or personal branding or whatever the next big thing is.
To talk about the thing that has always separated the agents at the top from everyone else, and why most agents are still finding reasons to avoid it.
Hundreds of agents tuned in.
What followed was not a comfortable conversation. I do not think Tom or Diego intended it to be.
The distraction hiding in plain sight
Most agents are not ignoring prospecting. They are replacing it with something that feels like prospecting.
Content calendars. Reels. Personal branding decks. Visible, shareable, and producing almost no listings.
Tom Panos has a direct way of naming it: “I’ve done a survey of real estate agents who struggled with prospecting, and the single number one distraction was social media.”
That landed hard in the chat.
Diego Traglia is not anti-social media. It contributes meaningfully to his business today. But he is very precise about the order of operations.
“A lot of newer agents think that just having a social media strategy will allow them to build a business. The reality is that social media only came to be helpful after I already had a profile. After I was already an attraction business.”
Content builds awareness over time. Conversations build listings now. One of them feels productive. The other one is just hard.
What five years of discipline actually looks like
Diego arrived in New Zealand with $5,000, no contacts, and no listings. He started doorknocking 356 houses every single week.
The first three calls he got back were complaints about how often his flyers were showing up.
He kept going.
Four and a half years of doorknocking four or five times a week. Calls every morning. Activity tracked.
He did not stop until the phones were ringing more than ringing out.
“You get successful by doing the basics day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out. There is no secret. There is no magic bullet.”
From the very beginning, his approach was to give something at every interaction rather than take something.
Market information, recent sales, an honest read on the street. No ask attached.
Do that for long enough, and the trust that builds is not something a content strategy can replicate or shortcut.
Selling a property every 48 hours now. Not luck. Just what consistency compounds into overtime.
The script that actually works
The best moment in the webinar was when Diego read out exactly what he says when he cold calls. It looks almost too simple.
“Hi, it’s Diego here from Harcourts. I know you’re busy and you’re not selling. I’ll be very brief. There have been two recent sales on your street that are affecting everyone’s property values. Would it be helpful if I told you what they went for?”
No pitch. No manufactured rapport. No urgency that is not real. Just a direct reason for the call and an easy yes or no.
Tom Panos on the philosophy behind it: “Stop treating them like prospects. Start treating them like students. Your whole approach becomes one of education, not desperation.”
When the conversation warms up, Traglia does not push for the appointment. One question: “Have you got any plans to make a move this year?”
Not ready? He offers to text through the sale details and check back in 90 days, with a clear option to opt out.
“I don’t ask. I give, and they get the option to opt out. At the end of the call, I want them thinking: who was that, and how were they so helpful?”
Not closing. Not overcoming objections. Just leaving people better informed than when they picked up.
The honest bit about data
I should be upfront. iD4me is a real estate data platform. We hosted the webinar. That context exists.
But sitting through that conversation, what struck me was how little the data actually features in the discipline equation.
What it does is remove a specific friction. Diego door-knocked for years because that was the only way to find who to call.
Today, iD4me gives agents across Australia access to contact details for close to 90 per cent of the population. In New Zealand, over two million verified mobiles and emails, fully consented and compliant.
Who to call: largely solved. Whether you will call: entirely on you.
Tom Panos: “Powerful lists equal powerful results.”
Diego, on what it would have meant a decade earlier: “I wish I’d had these phone numbers 10 years ago.
I can do 10 calls in the time it used to take me to do 10 door knocks.”
Better data compresses the effort. It does not replace it.
The rule most agents ignore
Tom closed the webinar with what he calls the 30-day rule. What you do in the next 30 days determines your listing flow in the 90 days that follow.
The feedback loop is long enough that most agents quit before they see the return. Which means they never see the return. Which confirms what they already suspected.
The agents who build businesses like Traglia’s treat consistency as the strategy, not a personality trait. Prospecting goes in the diary like a client appointment.
Activity gets measured the same way results do. Rejection is a data point, not a verdict.
“Never let perfect get in the way of better. Just make the call.”
I am new enough to this industry to still find it surprising how much of what works just comes back to this.
Diego was doing it when people were ringing to complain about his flyers.
The agents at the top of every leaderboard are still doing it now.
The phone is still ringing. The only question is whether you are the one picking it up.
View the full webinar below: