TOGETHER WITH LIBERTAS & EXP REALTY

By Tim & Julie Harris · May 21, 2026
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If you haven't closed a deal in 90 days, this is for you and only you. Close the door. Put your phone on silent.
This is the conversation we usually only have on private calls. The intervention call. The recovery playbook nobody wants to talk about in public because it's uncomfortable. But the agents who hear it before they need it never end up needing it.
The surprising part of who actually ends up here
You'd assume the calls come from new agents. They don't. The leadless, listless, "I'm in a rut" calls come from grizzled veterans — agents who've been on the awards banquet circuit for 20 years, multi-million-dollar producers, agents whose names are recognized in their entire region. They won't say I'm broke. They'll say I feel stuck.
It happens because past performance gets coasted on. Six months ago they were doing the real work. They got a wave of closings, stopped doing the work, and now the wave has dried up. The pattern is mechanical. Stop generating, and 90-120 days later you're staring at an empty pipeline wondering what happened.
Three hard truths
One. The work just doubled or tripled. To stay even with where you were a year ago, the contacts, conversations, and focused effort required in this market is 2-3x what it used to be. That's the floor, not the ceiling. Tell your family, your friends, your group chats that you're going on a 90-day social hiatus. Focus narrows the field.
Two. You don't actually know your burn rate. When we run intervention calls, almost nobody knows their real monthly business and personal expenses. They give us a round number. About this much. That's the tell. You can't fix what you can't see.
Use monarchmoney.com. Plug in your accounts, give it an hour, and it'll surface the recurring charges that are silently draining you — the $29.37 random renewals, the canceled subscriptions that quietly re-billed, the Dropbox and tech tools you forgot you signed up for.
We run this every quarter and still find leakage. Even better: load your downloads into Claude and have it audit your accounts for unusual charges, draft cancellation letters, and project your financial path forward. We just did this exact exercise for a coaching client and showed them they could be financially free in 36 months — they thought they never could.
Three. Stop doing anything that doesn't pay you in 60-90 days. This is the one nobody wants to write down, so do it. Make the list. The Instagram marketing. The YouTube coaching course you bought. The branding guru. The funnel guy. The speculative spend that promises results six months from now if you just commit to one more sprint.
For 90 days, the rule is simple: no new tool, no new course, no new platform. Only revenue-producing activity that touches a human.
Where your closings actually come from
Here's the story that should land harder than anything else in this episode. When we were selling hundreds of homes a year at ReMax, we had a small office and an admin named Kelly who handled lead intake. She had two scripts on her desk — red for sellers, blue for buyers. Old school clipboard system.
A seller called in. Kelly worked through the script and got to the question: "What caused you to call Tim and Julie?" The seller said the postcard. Kelly wasn't paying full attention, asked again. Same question, same words. This time the seller gave the real answer — "Actually, our neighbor used you." Then later, "Our friend from church." The postcard was a reinforcement, not a source.
That broke our brains. We put Kelly on a mission to call the last 30-40 closings and ask the same question — twice. Every single one came back the same. Not the postcards. Not the moving truck. Not the suburban fleet with our brand on the side. Not the internet marketing. Referrals from past clients and sphere. Every single time.
The modern version of this mistake is happening to you right now. You get a DM on Instagram. You assume it came from Instagram. You never ask the real question. So you keep pouring time and money into the platform that's actually just where the referral confirmed you exist — the new Yellow Pages.
If passive marketing is reinforcing real proactive work, fine. But if you've stopped the proactive work and you're propping yourself up with passive activity, your pipeline is on a timer.
The 90-day recovery action list
Pick three of these and execute starting today:
Fix your lead follow-up first. If you've been in the business 90+ days, there are leads sitting in your phone right now. Pre-qualify them. Use the buyer pre-qualification script — and remember its real purpose is finding out if they have a house to sell. Pre-qualification is listing generation in disguise.
Hold a high-powered open house in a first-time buyer neighborhood. Fastest path to a closing inside 30 days when you're starting from zero. They don't need to sell first. Most don't have an entrenched agent. Door knock the neighborhood the day before. Pre-qualify everyone who walks in.
Call FSBOs and expireds. The 40-50% expired-listing wave we've been projecting all year is here. These sellers have to sell, they have no other agent in mind, and the doors are wide open. This is where listings come from in the second half of the year.
Talk to everyone in your phone. Does every contact in there know what you do? If we called 100 of them today and asked, how many would say "real estate agent"? Fix that this week.
Make new build rep calls. Their buyers can't close on a new build without selling their current home. That's a free listing referral pipeline most agents never tap.
The warning for the agents having their best year
The agents most at risk right now aren't the ones in trouble. They're the ones who have momentum, who are having their best year ever, and who've quietly stopped doing the work that produced the momentum. You're riding 90-day-old activity. The wave runs out. The drought hits in Q1 next year.
If you're in this group, this is your warning. Run the playbook anyway. Treat momentum like a perishable resource. The agents who win in 2027 are the ones doing the work this summer — when nobody else is.
The grow-up moment
Everything you want is on the other side of doing what you don't want to do, when you don't want to do it, at the highest level. The reason this advice always works is that almost nobody follows it. The agents who do have no competition.
Don't grow up. Just decide which version of yourself shows up tomorrow.
Ready to stop guessing and start producing?
💼 Build wealth with Tim's eXp team: whylibertas.com/harris
📲 Elite Coaching — text Tim directly: 512-758-0206
If you ran the postcard test on your last 10 closings — called them and asked twice where they really came from — what would the honest answer be?
— Tim & Julie Harris
Founders of Tim & Julie Harris Real Estate Coaching | Publishers of Harris Real Estate Daily | Hosts of PowerHouseTalk | eXp Realty Sponsors at Libertas
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