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Are you nervous about your real estate business surviving 2025? Glennda Baker isn’t. She showed up to our Zoom interview decked out in full celebrity Realtor drip: Gucci jacket, Van Cleef earrings and a diamond-studded Rolex that sparkled every time she gestured with her left hand, which she did a lot. She runs a highly successful team, has close to a million followers on TikTok and keynotes major real estate conferences. I could go on.
She’s also absurdly charming and overcame high school bullies, a drinking problem, a failed marriage and multiple recessions to become a superstar agent. So no, she’s not nervous about keeping her career. Why would she be? She is crushing it in pretty much every way a real estate agent can.
So when we were looking for someone to dish out actionable advice to help agents survive the perfect storm of 2025, Baker was our first choice. She walked us through her first-principles strategies for building a lasting career in real estate, how she uses DiSC profiles to market to leads and wrapped up with her three best scripts. 2025 will be make or break for some agents. These five strategies just might tip the scale in your favor.
Glennda Baker: By the numbers
- Market: Atlanta, Georgia
- Niche: Luxury listings
- 2024 sales volume + sides: $70 million + 75 sides
- Primary lead generation strategy: Past clients, SOI, social media
- Number of TikTok followers: 871,900
- Real estate coach: Tom Ferry
- Highest ROI real estate software: Google Sheets, Highnote
1. R&D the best agent in your farm area
The key to building a lasting career in real estate in 2025 is simple, but not easy: learn from the best, then rip off and duplicate (R&D) their strategies.
As a brand-new agent in 1992, Baker had all the right ingredients for success — extraversion, tenacity and an unflagging work ethic — but she was still clueless about real estate. So she found the top agent in her brokerage and chose a desk right outside her office. She came in early, stayed late and did everything she could to learn from her:
“All day, I just listened to everything she said. I listened to how she talked to people. I listened to how she got listings. When she needed flyers printed, I just happened to walk by her office. “Glennda, could you make copies for me?” Absolutely. “Glennda, could you take this sign for me?” Absolutely. Could you hold this house open? Absolutely. Whatever that girl needed, I showed up for her. I told myself, ‘Okay, well, she’s the number one agent. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. I’ll just do what she does. And sure enough, by December, I was agent of the month.”
When I asked her if a formal mentorship might have been more beneficial, she demurred. Most of what she learned, she learned through listening to a top producer work, all day, every day. Something you can’t get from weekly or even daily calls with a mentor:
“I learned the most from hearing how she talked to her sellers, how she negotiated deals, how she talked to other agents. What really made an impression on me was how she spoke with so much certainty and clarity and confidence that no wonder people listen to her. You believed everything she said.”
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2. Data is still the best antidote to fear in 2025
Confidence is a key that opens many doors in real estate, but walking through them requires knowledge — and lots of it. We’ve all watched new agents charm their way through a cold call only to fold like a cheap suit at the first objection. Data builds confidence. Agents who know their markets inside and out will thrive in 2025.
Baker’s strategy for learning confidence-boosting data is simple. You need to learn everything you possibly can about every home in a three-mile radius from where you work, live and play. Your Three Mile Zone (TMZ).
“You should know as much as possible about every house in your TMZ. You should be able to recite that data off the top of your head because nothing accelerates credibility faster than proof. And when you can speak intelligently about real estate, whether you sold one house or 10 houses, when you can speak intelligently about every house in your TMZ, you automatically become the neighborhood expert.”
Baker suggested that every agent, new and old, should see as many listings as possible each day. Go on broker opens, go on caravans and tour new listings on your own. Whatever it takes.
When you get back to the office, crunch the numbers. Learn how to tell if the listing is priced well for the neighborhood until it becomes second nature. Altos is a mission-critical tool for comparing listings to local market trends. It gives you weekly deep-dive market reports to learn your market and even includes automated drip campaigns for data-driven lead nurturing. You can get your first report for free below.
Visit Altos
3. Find your tribe
Think you’re going to survive 2025 sitting alone at your kitchen table? Think again. Real estate is a team sport. It always has been. Finding a group of fellow agents to work with, even if you’re competing for the same leads, can turbocharge your business.
Coworking over Zoom can work in a pinch, but it’s not a substitute for the camaraderie and learning you get from being in the office. Here’s Baker:
“I’m in my office right now. Evelyn’s here, Elizabeth’s here, and we’re together in our office every day. We hear each other talk about the transactions we’re trying to close, new listings coming onto the market, and there’s a lot of value in that. If we’re going to have a hard conversation with a client, we script it out together. So that when we speak to the client, it’s not the first time we’re having that conversation.”
Real estate favors the bold. Being bold is much easier when you have a supportive team around you. Make a pact with at least three other agents to work from the office every day. You should be in the office so much that the janitor wonders if you live there. Come in early. Stay late. Share. Listen.
Related article
Thinking of joining a real estate team? Here’s everything you should know
4. Sugar and spice real estate advice > hyper-local content on TikTok
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen Glennda Baker’s TikTok videos. She’s arguably the most famous Realtor on social media today. She’s like the Oprah of the real estate industry, but instead of helping people heal their inner child, she dishes out hard-won real estate advice and funny stories with a healthy dose of Southern sass.
If you’re struggling to break through on TikTok or Instagram, here is Baker’s formula for social media success and the call to action (CTA) she ends every video with:
“It’s not always about making local content. What I try and do is sugar and spice real estate advice. It’s the cold, hard truth about real estate with my Southern sass. And I always say, my name is Glenda Baker. I’m a real estate agent in Atlanta, Georgia. Send me a text, tag me in a post, give me a call.”
For a deeper dive into generating leads on TikTok, check out my interview with Los Angeles team leader Kina Desantis below. She built an $80 million team using Baker’s sugar and spice real estate advice strategy.
Related article
The TikTok strategy that helped one agent build an $89 million business in four years
5. Sharpen your marketing and lead nurturing with personal insights
If you want to compete with agents using AI, you need to step up your marketing game in 2025. AI excels at writing generic ad copy about buying and selling homes. It can crank out a year’s worth of educational blog posts in seconds. So if you want your marketing to stand out in 2025, you need to get personal.
Baker uses Crystal Knows to do just that. Crystal Knows is a powerful (and mildly creepy) software platform that scrapes your leads’ social media profiles to measure their personality and provides actionable advice on the type of messaging they are likely to respond to.
For example, if your lead is an Analyst (a DiSC personality type), they will be more likely to be persuaded by cold, hard data and straightforward language. Invaluable data to have for a cold call, follow-up email or listing presentation.
At a minimum, use AI lead enhancement software, such as Scout, to gather as much useful marketing data as possible for your leads. Scout provides you with crucial information for marketing campaigns and follow-ups, such as the number of bedrooms, square footage and time of ownership of their current home. Scout’s AI then creates automated personalized email drip campaigns to nurture them.
Visit Scout
Glennda Baker’s three best scripts for 2025
As promised, here are Glennda Baker’s three most useful scripts for 2025:
Buyer feedback script
Agent: At what price are you a buyer for this listing today?
Here’s Baker on why this script works so well:
“That’s all I need to know. I don’t need to know what you thought about the curb appeal. I don’t need to know what you thought about the inside. I don’t need to know what you thought about the kitchen. All I need to know is at what price are you a buyer for this listing today?
‘Oh, Glennda, I’m never going to buy this house because it doesn’t have a primary bedroom. It doesn’t have a big enough backyard. It needs too much work.’
You’ll get all the information you need by asking that.
‘Well, Glennda, my clients might be a buyer for 123 Banana Street at a million. You know what? Go ahead and put that offer in writing to me and let me see if I can get us to the end zone.’”
SOI script
Agent: Hey, how are you doing?
Prospect: Doing great. How are you?
Agent: Living the dream, selling houses every day.
Prospect: Oh, you’re in real estate.
Agent: I am in real estate. Please tell me that you know somebody who wants to sell, because I’ve got people standing in line to buy a house.
Circle prospecting script
Agent: Hey there. My name is [Your Name]. I just want you to know I’m listing [listing address] for sale. I wanted you to know before anybody else. Let me ask you a question. Do you know anybody else in your neighborhood who’s thinking about selling? I hope I sell [listing address], but if I don’t, I want to make sure I know everyone else in the neighborhood who is thinking about selling.
Homeowner: No, I don’t know anybody who’s thinking about selling.
Agent: Oh, okay, great. Let me ask you a question: At what price would you be a seller?
Homeowner: I would never sell my house. I love it. I’m going out feet first.
Agent: Great. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make you a binder that has all the important documents of your home, and I’m going to drop it off. Just make sure you put it with all your important papers so when your kids take you out feet first, they’ll have my contact information.
Your turn
Know an agent who’s thriving despite the odds and has actionable insights to share? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us here: vetted@housingwire.com.
