How a Virginia Beach team 2.5x'd their Zillow target by replacing sales scripts with a relationship-first buyer conversion system.
The phrase Micah Laurendeau says roughly 30 times a day is not a motivational tagline. It's the operating principle his Virginia Beach team has organized an entire conversion system around.
Stop selling houses. Start building relationships.
His team, The Real Estate Group, ranked #1 nationally with Movoto Pro+ and closed out a Zillow performance period at nearly 29 against a target of 11.4. Those numbers didn't come from better objection scripts or harder closes.
They came from rethinking what the first conversation with a buyer is actually supposed to accomplish.
The gap most team models leave open
Micah's story starts where a lot of team leaders end up eventually.
Years of early success built around a handful of strong salespeople, a market shift, and then those people moved on, as high-performing salespeople tend to do.
What remained was a group of service-oriented, relationship-driven agents who weren't natural closers, and a model that had quietly been designed around the few rather than the many.
He spent 2023 rebuilding around that gap. What he found is that relationship-driven agents, given the right framework, can consistently outperform agents trained in traditional sales techniques.
The catch is that the system has to be built for them, not retrofitted from a sales playbook that never fit.Getting out in front of the objections
That rebuilt system starts with the very first call, which is also where many teams quietly undermine the relationship before it begins.
Standard conversion practice treats objections as things to overcome: a buyer says they're a year out, the agent tries to cut that in half, both parties know the game being played, and trust erodes before the second sentence. Micah's team does something different.
From the opening of the call, agents name the objections before the buyer can raise them. They acknowledge it's probably a bad time to talk. They position themselves as not trying to sell anything right now.
The effect is that buyers stop anticipating a pitch, and the tone of the conversation shifts.
There's a deliberate tense shift that Micah coaches alongside this. Agents ask about what buyers will need when they're ready, not what they need right now.
In Micah's experience, that single adjustment tends to produce significantly more honest answers, because it removes the pressure of the present moment from the conversation.
The question that tends to change what buyers will share
The specific question Micah coaches his agents to use is: what is it about your current home that isn't working for you?
The phrasing matters more than it might seem at first. Asking what someone doesn't like about their house frames their prior decision as a mistake, and many people will defend their choice rather than open up about it.
Asking what isn't working for them now treats the need to move as a natural evolution. That framing tends to shift what people are willing to share.
The answers that come back are often personal in ways that don't emerge from more transactional questions.
A health condition that makes stairs impractical.
A pregnancy that suddenly makes a one-bedroom inadequate.
Children who've moved out, leaving a house that no longer fits.
Those details aren't just search criteria. They're what makes a relationship worth maintaining over months or years of nurturing.
Micah coaches agents to go one level deeper with whatever they hear, not into territory that feels intrusive, but enough to signal that they registered what was said.
Many agents hear something personal and redirect immediately back to square footage or bedroom count.In Micah's view, that redirect is something clients notice, even when they don't say so.
Building enough trust for those personal details to emerge depends partly on what agents ask and partly on what they resist rushing past.
Staying in the picture without closing everything down
One thing Micah coaches that runs against most conversion instincts is that agents shouldn't try to answer every question on the first call.
When a buyer gets the specific piece of information they called about, the call typically ends. Micah's team is trained to find a natural reason to follow up the next day instead, which creates another point of contact and another opportunity to deepen the relationship before anything transactional comes up.
A single-touch exchange rarely builds the kind of relationship that holds up over a year-long buying timeline.
On the practical side, he coaches agents to send clients a digital contact card and ask them, while still on the call, to save it under "Realtor [First Name]."
The goal is simple: buyers who'd otherwise lose track of who they spoke with can find the agent quickly when they're ready to reach back out.Many buyers genuinely cannot recall who they talked to two or three weeks earlier, no matter how well the conversation went. Being easy to find tends to matter more than being memorable.
The point of staying findable isn't just to be remembered. It's to be reachable when something in the buyer's circumstances shifts, because that shift is usually what changes the timeline more than any follow-up sequence does.
When the timeline starts moving
Micah's team largely stops trying to predict when a buyer will be ready. Not because timing is irrelevant, but because they've observed that the timeline often changes faster than any projection would suggest, and the driver is usually emotional rather than logistical.
A buyer who has been consistent about being a year out can become an active buyer within weeks of walking through a property that resonates with something personal.
So rather than tracking and chasing a projected timeline, Micah's team focuses on staying present by sending relevant properties periodically. Not in volume, typically one or two at a time, with a short message that doesn't ask for anything in return.
The goal is to keep the relationship warm during the long stretches where nothing seems to be happening.Many buyers won't respond to those messages. Micah's view is that silence isn't a signal that the effort isn't landing.
If the contact is someone the agent has already spoken with, a periodic acknowledgment that someone is thinking of them tends to matter, even without a reply.
Getting to a first in-person meeting is its own strategy. Micah's team will show contingent listings as a low-pressure way to get in front of a buyer before a transaction is imminent. They'll frame exploratory visits as learning trips rather than shopping days.
They position buyer strategy meetings — which they call buyer strategy meetings rather than buyer consultations — as something most agents never offer. A fair number of buyers respond well to someone who proposes sitting down to think through the process before any specific property is on the table.
In Micah's experience, once buyers start getting into homes and feeling them, the timelines tend to move on their own.
What technology can and can't carry
All of this is context for how Micah thinks about AI and nurture tools. At the Ylopo Success Summit, he put it directly: if agents can't build a real human connection when the lead finally reaches them, the technology that generated that lead stops mattering.
He's found value in MaverickRE's agent nudging tools and notes that adoption on his team has been stronger than he expected.
His framing for agents is that a nudge is a notification that a potential commission is about to slip through the cracks, not a system monitoring their behavior.
That framing tends to change how agents receive it.
The broader point is that AI-driven nurture works when it's augmenting something real. Teams that invest in technology without building the human layer first often find the tools underperform in ways the tools themselves can't explain.
Watch Micah's full talk
Micah covered all of this at the Ylopo Success Summit, including the specific scripts, the psychology behind the framing, and the performance numbers his team has produced by running this system consistently.
▶️ Watch Micah Laurendeau's full session at the Ylopo Success Summit
If any of these concepts feel relevant to your team, the individual pieces are worth looking at more closely.
The objection-framing approach, the future-tense scripting, the push listing cadence (automated property alerts sent to leads at key points in the nurture cycle), and the buyer strategy meeting structure each have their own mechanics that a summary can only gesture at.
Want leads that are worth nurturing in the first place?
Micah's system works because the relationships are real. Ylopo's lead generation and AI nurturing platform is built to put the right buyers in front of the right agents at the right moment — so that when that first call happens, there's already context to work with. See how Ylopo works.
Aaron Franklin
Head of Growth
Aaron "Kiwi" Franklin is the Head of Growth at Ylopo and a serial technologist and entrepreneur who has over 25 years of experience creating digital solutions for major brands and pioneering companies where technology and real estate meet. His depth of expertise stems from leading development of the first website for Apple to founding a global community of over 1,000 elite athletes.