Ninety-One Percent Would Use You Again. Eighteen Percent Did.

There is one pair of numbers in the National Association of Realtors’ annual survey that explains more about a real estate career than anything else I have read. Both halves come from the same report, so there is no apples-to-oranges problem to argue about.

91% of home buyers say they would use their agent again or recommend them.

Among repeat buyers — the only people in the survey who actually had the chance — 18% did.

That is the 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, mailed to 173,250 recent buyers in July 2025, 6,103 responses, margin of error ±1.25%. Exhibits 4-11 and 4-6 if you want to look it up yourself.

That gap is not a service problem

Ninety-one percent were happy with you. They are not withholding the next transaction out of dissatisfaction. They simply were not thinking about you when it came around, and by then somebody else was.

The same survey says 38% of buyers have not recommended their agent even once since the purchase. The median number of recommendations an agent gets from a past buyer is one.

And the window in which all of this has to happen got much longer. Sellers in 2025 had owned their home a median of 11 years. Buyers say they expect to stay 15. It was six years in the 2000s. Redfin’s independent analysis of county deed records — a completely different method — puts tenure at 12 years, which is close enough to believe both.

Eleven years is a long time to be remembered by somebody you have not spoken to.

What the veterans are actually doing differently

From the NAR 2026 Member Profile:

Four-fifths of a veteran agent’s business comes from people they already sold to, or people those people sent. The new agent has none of it. Not because they are worse at the job — because they have not had time to accumulate anybody to be remembered by.

What separates year sixteen from year two is a database and the discipline to stay in it.

The decision is made before the shopping starts

This is the part that should change how you think about marketing spend. 80% of sellers contacted only one agent before hiring (Exhibit 7-3). They did not comparison shop. They called somebody.

And how they picked (Exhibit 7-7): reputation 35%, referral from a friend or family member 15%, commission rate 4%.

You are not competing on rate. You are competing to be the name that surfaces in a four-second window, in a kitchen, when somebody asks a question. That is a memory contest, and almost nobody runs their business as though it is one.

What past clients say they want from you

NAR asked buyers which forms of contact they value (Exhibit 4-9):

One-to-one beats broadcast by about ten to one. NAR does not test physical mail, so I am arguing by category here rather than claiming NAR measured cards — but the split between something sent to you and something sent to a list is as clean as survey data gets. A card is on the personal side of that line. A market-update newsletter is on the 7% side.

Two numbers I am not going to give you

The draft of this article said paid-portal acquisition runs $300 to $800 per closing. That is wrong by roughly a factor of ten, and it came off the wrong row of the source table. Real coaching figures land at $1,000 to $4,000, and portal-specific estimates run $2,500 to $8,000. I am telling you because the correct number argues my case harder, and because a number that flattering should have made somebody suspicious.

There is also no disinterested figure for portal lead conversion, and no credible lifetime-value benchmark for a real estate client — the $75,000 to $150,000 you see quoted comes from coaching programs, not research. What is documentable: the Consumer Policy Center reported in February 2026 that referral networks take 30% to 40% of the commission, and Zillow’s own 10-K confirms the pay-when-you-close structure. Work out what a third of a commission is worth against staying in touch with someone who already used you.

The occasion nobody has claimed

Everybody sends a December card. Which means everybody’s December card lands in the same week, in the same stack, and yours is the ninth.

The home anniversary card is the better move, and almost nobody sends one. It arrives in an empty mailbox. It refers to the single best day you and that client had together. It requires no explanation for why it showed up. And you already have the date — it is on the closing documents.

Send that one every year, send a December card as well, and put one specific line in each. Not “thinking of you this holiday season.” Something about the house, or the dog, or the inspection that nearly killed the deal.

Federal survey data says mail sent to someone with a prior business relationship is read at 64% against 36% for strangers (USPS Household Mail Survey FY2025). Your past-client list is that 64% column, it is sitting in your CRM, and for most agents it is the list that never gets mailed.

Ninety-one percent of them would use you again. Eighteen percent do. Everything in between is whether they were thinking about you.