Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community, and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!

Let’s get one thing straight: The market isn’t going to make you successful. Your strategy will.

In real estate, it’s easy to fall into the habit of blaming the market. When activity slows down, there are some go-to explanations: “Rates are too high.” “Buyers are waiting.” “Sellers don’t want to trade their low mortgage.” 

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All of that might be true — but it’s not the full story. Deals are still happening. Properties are still trading hands. People still need to move. What’s different is how those deals are made. In slower markets, agents who are strategic, creative and proactive rise to the top. Those who wait for conditions to change get left behind.

In a city like New York, you learn quickly that the market is never “easy.” There’s always something — interest rates, inventory challenges or shifting buyer psychology. The agents who succeed here are the ones who know how to pivot. They don’t rely on the market to do the heavy lifting. Instead, they rely on their ability to outthink and outwork the competition.

If you’re sitting around waiting for a “hot market” to carry you, you’re wasting time. What you really need is a smarter strategy. Here’s where to start:

1. Position the property, not just the price

Pricing is important, but it’s not the whole game. In a slower market, it’s not enough to simply “price to sell.” You need to understand the psychology behind buyer decision-making.

What problem does this property solve for them? What emotion are you tapping into?

• Is it value — like a first-time buyer who feels they’re finally “getting in” to a coveted neighborhood?
• Is it potential — an investor visualizing how they can maximize rental income or flip value?
• Or is it exclusivity — that emotional pull of owning a one-of-a-kind penthouse with skyline views no one else can claim?

These emotional drivers are often more powerful than square footage or finishes. 

The story you tell around a listing — how you position it in the market — can be the difference between sitting stale and sparking interest. Great agents know how to package even a “challenging” property in a way that resonates with the right audience. Pricing is a tool, but positioning is an art.

2. Build hyperlocal relevance

In a city as vast and competitive as New York, being “a real estate agent” isn’t enough. The agents who win are hyperlocal experts. They know their neighborhoods inside and out — not just the comps, but the culture, the community and the hidden gems.

Building hyperlocal relevance means consistently showing up where your audience lives and plays. It’s hosting community events, creating valuable local content or supporting neighborhood businesses. When you become the go-to resource in your area, you stop competing for attention. People come to you. Market share starts with mindshare. Focus local, build deep relationships, and watch your business grow.

3. Leverage creative partnerships

When traditional channels aren’t producing results, it’s time to think outside the box. Partnerships are a powerful way to expand your reach and create new opportunities.

Think about local businesses, art galleries, design firms, wellness studios: Who shares your target audience but isn’t a direct competitor? Collaborating with these partners can help you tap into fresh networks, create memorable experiences and add value in ways that standard marketing can’t.

The goal is to create buzz where there was none. To reach people who may not be actively looking but are open to the right opportunity. In a tight market, visibility is everything. Creative partnerships give you an edge.

4. Work your database, not just your feed

Social media is important, but your most valuable assets are often sitting quietly in your database. Past clients, sphere of influence, referral partners — these are the people most likely to trust you, recommend you and work with you again. Yet many agents neglect this warm audience in favor of chasing cold leads online. Big mistake.

A smart, consistent outreach strategy can reignite old relationships and generate new business. Whether it’s personalized check-ins, client appreciation events or valuable market updates, staying in front of your database should be non-negotiable.

5. Take ownership of your strategy 

At the end of the day, you can’t control interest rates, market cycles or buyer hesitations. But you can control how you show up, how you think and how you act. The agents who thrive in markets like this are the ones who take ownership of their strategy, not the ones waiting for conditions to change. 

Success in New York City real estate comes down to positioning, relationships and creativity. The market isn’t going to hand you business. You have to go out and get it — strategically, deliberately, relentlessly. In a slower market, your relationships are your lifeline. Treat them accordingly.

Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community, and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!

If you’re a real estate agent navigating today’s unpredictable market, struggling to convert leads or just feeling stuck, this is the interview you can’t afford to miss.

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I recently sat down with Ricky Carruth, one of the most authentic voices in real estate coaching today. With over 100 home sales annually and a thriving national coaching platform, Carruth doesn’t just talk theory — he’s lived it. Now, he’s on a mission to help agents like you cut through the noise and build sustainable, meaningful careers.

What we cover in the interview

Why conversations, not conversions, are the secret to your real estate success

Carruth explains why your number of conversations is the most critical metric in your business. It’s not about turning a “no” into a “yes” — it’s about creating more opportunities to hear “yes” in the first place.

How to build genuine, deep relationships that last a lifetime

In a post-commission-lawsuit world, trust and value matter more than ever. Carruth shows how agents who lead with service and empathy can win in any market.

The truth about systems, CRMs and drip campaigns

Spoiler alert: Most things agents are told to prioritize slow them down. Carruth shares how simplicity and focus are the real keys to scaling your business.

The coming real estate boom — and how to position yourself for it

Yes, rates are high. Yes, inventory is tight. But Carruth explains why we are on the verge of a historic market shift and how you can prepare to dominate the next decade.

Why the best agents are already working harder, while others wait on the sidelines

This conversation is a wake-up call. The market won’t wait for you to get ready. Carruth lays out precisely what agents should do to become the go-to name when the tsunami of transactions hits.

What makes this interview different?

Carruth doesn’t hold anything back. From lead generation and follow-up, to mindset and faith, to why most agents fail, he gives away the blueprint he used to go from zero to a diamond. 

If you’re tired of fluff-filled motivational talks and want fundamental, actionable strategies from someone who’s done it, this is your moment.

Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Florida has become a hot spot for second homebuyers and affluent clients seeking a more relaxed lifestyle.

But what many found when they flocked to the beachy oasis — besides tax benefits — was a destination where they could find themselves settling down full-time.

Top agents based out of Miami, Palm Beach and 30A during Inman on Tour Miami on Tuesday told similar stories of their clients coming to their region for a getaway and deciding to stay for the long haul.

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“I think that Miami is a city that is so dynamic and that it’s grown up tremendously from being a vacation destination to now it’s where tech companies are, it’s where finance companies are,” Jill Hertzberg of the Jills Zeder Group at Coldwell Banker said. “And people are living here, relocating here — it’s no longer a vacation destination.”

Hertzberg’s son, Danny, who is also on her real estate team, added that as people tied to finance or other hubs of industry located in various parts of the country began to move to the area, they ultimately brought their businesses to Miami with them, which created a snowball effect.

“That growth was really tremendous,” Danny Hertzberg said. “So the city went from kind of like a beach, second-home destination, to a primary residence, to a major tech and finance hub that’s driving a lot of the economy here, and I’m very excited about the future of work in Miami.”

Holly Meyer Lucas of the Meyer Lucas Real Estate Team operates in Jupiter and Palm Beach, and noted that the migration of wealth in recent years has brought significant opportunity for real estate agents in the area, because in addition to the swaths of billionaires moving to Palm Beach, all of their staff are similarly moving to the area with them.

“We’re in the middle of one of the most significant mass migrations of wealth and of population in American history,” Lucas said.

She added that agents should take the opportunity to sit on local municipal decision-making boards to help encourage development in these areas of migration to help better serve clients with more inventory.

More people came to learn about the pristine planned communities in 30A where Hilary Farnum-Fasth of Corcoran Reverie operated during the pandemic, she said, and the market subsequently saw “explosive” growth.

“We saw a huge surge,” Farnum-Fasth said. “It was just incredible, because it was just so undervalued because nobody knew about it.”

As new residents continue to look for homes in Miami, the elder Hertzberg said what’s been interesting is that, she’s called up her clients who moved to the area in 2020, wondering if they’re ready to sell (so she can free up more inventory), and “nobody has wanted to sell.”

“That’s the incredible thing here,” she said.

The agents who succeed in these desirable markets are those who are hyper-plugged into the community, panelists at Inman on Tour Miami said, from knowing about country clubs, to local schools, to hair dressers and beyond.

“Then they’re thinking about all things local, particularly people relocating to our markets because we all have people relocating, and you’re plugged in with the city and you know what’s happening in terms of zoning and you’re keeping people updated,” Danny Hertzberg said. “If your clients look to you as a local resource, you’re not going to have all the answers, but you know how to connect the dots and get the right type of attorney for a dock versus the right type of attorney to put an addition off of the home versus the right type for accounting …”

And beyond that, it’s about working well with other agents to get a deal done, Lucas said. She recalled that during the pandemic when she was in the advanced stages of pregnancy with her third child and showing a property to her buyer that was represented by Jill, she was having a difficult day, and ended up asking her to drive her and her client around a bit because she wasn’t feeling up to it.

“And my point with this is, that without missing a beat and without throwing in the bus or without flexing or doing anything weird that I feel like lower-tier agents do, she gave me the opportunity to, she would refer to me if my buyer asked a question to give me the opportunity to answer the question and I referred back to her. It was like we worked just so seamlessly in sync with each other,” Lucas said.

“The way that you can really cannibalize a career is by being sharky and by being aggressive and that’s not how we operate at the top of the market,” she added.

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Email Lillian Dickerson

Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community, and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!

Artificial intelligence‘s hold on real estate — and the world — has only gotten stronger over the past year, sparking further conversation on whether large language models like ChatGPT and other categories of AI tools are doing more harm than good to education and business sectors. Despite the questions that still linger about AI, two leading Florida brokers and a proptech innovator told the Inman On Tour Miami crowd they can’t afford to eschew the technology in an increasingly fast-paced world.

Jonathan Spears

“Anytime you try to get an agent to adopt new technology, it’s like pulling teeth. I think the issue of AI with agents is that their use of the technology is driven more by fear than it is curiosity,” Spears Group founder Jonathan Spears said.

“I think we, as agents, have gone away from the curiosity of this technology that we’re afraid is going to take our job, when, in reality, we need to look at it curiously. Think about how a child asks their mom and dad questions, like ‘What does this do? What does that do?’”

“It’s touching every other industry, including the grocery store you shop at [and] your financial tech. I mean, everything’s being disrupted,” he added. “You want to get involved now — or even later — and, ultimately, be able to leverage it to multiply yourself.”

Although ChatGPT gets most of the attention, Spears, LoKation Real Estate Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Lickstein and Propy CEO Natalia Karayaneva said there are multiple ways to leverage AI.

Lickstein said he’s laser-focused on AI’s role in bolstering the end-to-end experience for agents and consumers. The CEO pointed to Zillow and Realtor.com’s lead generation systems as an example of what agents can replicate with an AI-powered customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

“You’re seeing this end-to-end solution being provided by the major portals, and it’s a lot more attainable for the individual agent and team than you might think,” he said. “There are a lot of platforms out there right now, like voice agents that will integrate to your CRM and communicate for you, much like you’re seeing from the Zillow Flex and the new Realtor.com program, where they have a call center that’s reaching out to the leads in a timely manner, satisfying that speed to lead, and then bringing that information back to allow you to operate smarter, faster and better.”

Lickstein said agents need to have an end-to-end solution to keep leads in their ecosystem. For some brokerages, that could mean investing in proprietary tech like Spears, who’s poured thousands into creating a new CRM, MyOps. And for others, that means choosing the best third-party CRM system for their agents and supercharging it with an AI integration like Speculo.ai.

“The best [CRM] is the one that you’re going to log into and actually put information,” he said. “But then working with a third-party program that will latch on to your CRM, take an incoming lead, call them instantly and extract information from that conversation to give you knowledge when you’re going into an appointment, or create the follow-up method for you is invaluable. You just plug and play. No coding experience whatsoever.”

Natalia Karayaneva

For Karayaneva, AI is best used for offloading some of the busy work that prevents agents from being fully attentive to clients. Agents should be using AI to craft engaging property descriptions, fast-track the home search process, and streamline title and escrow.

“Realtors don’t have to come to the AI conversation with fear, but instead with the abundance mindset … AI can give us more time for personal life, for our families,” she said. “We know that transactions will be simpler, and instead of 30 days of anxiety, consumers and agents will have full transactions within a day.”

“The role of the agent will keep being this human element —  the psychologist, someone who knows the locality,” she added. “The role of the agent, in that sense, is never going away.”

Spears then echoed Karayaneva, saying that agents can use AI to stoke deeper conversations with buyers and sellers, many of whom have already used AI-powered tools on portals and other platforms well before signing a listing or buyer representation agreement.

“… AI can’t tell the whole story,” he said.  “If you’re an agent out there who’s transacting in the market and you go sit in a listing appointment, the seller may be equipped with all the information they’re pulling from technology, whether it be Zillow or wherever, but you should be able to sit down and be like, ‘Hey, man, I was part of that deal [you saw online] and the human element [of that deal] was this, and that’s my real value to you.’ And I don’t believe technology is going to be able to do that.”

Email Marian McPherson