Many people want to make money with AI, but even if they use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini every day and have tried every kind of AI agent tool, it’s still hard to actually turn that into income. Recently, a Reddit user shared a success story: he didn’t do anything brand new—instead, he helped other people dig back up the resources they had left sitting around until they were almost moldy.
This online user’s company is an automation agency. A while back, it built an AI tool combining SMS and voice for a real estate agent to contact the more than 60,000 leads in his CRM that no one had followed up on for years. The agency only charged about $5,000 in setup fees in total, but over 7 months, the real estate agent has closed 34 deals through it and earned about $490,000 in commissions.
Automation agency shares on Reddit: SMS + voice AI contacted 44,000 old leads, earning real estate agents $490,000 in commissions.
Reddit user Warm-Reaction-456 recently shared on r/AI_Agents that he runs an automation agency, has 8 years of relevant experience, and his client is a Canadian real estate agent whose CRM has accumulated more than 60,000 leads, dating back to 2017.
In the post, Warm-Reaction-456 specifically emphasized that this real estate agent had paid for every single lead at some point; it was just that the agent’s time was limited. When new leads came in, he would follow up with the new ones first. After following up with the old ones a few times with no response, he would just toss them into the CRM and never contact them again. His explanation was:
我想每個房仲都有類似的狀況。前幾週沒轉換成客人的名單，就這樣進了 CRM，然後基本上再也不會聯絡。
The real estate agent also knew there had to be opportunities to close deals in there, but he couldn’t possibly hire Inside Sales Agents (ISAs) for 60,000 people. In North American real estate teams, an ISA is responsible for calling and texting to qualify leads, finding the people who genuinely want to buy a home, and then handing them over to the agent. He estimated that if ISAs handled this list, it would take 4 full-time staff about 6 months to finish.
So they built an SMS AI and a voice AI for this real estate agent to complete this task.
We charged 5k for an AI system that's made our client 490k in commission
byu/Warm-Reaction-456 inAI_Agents
What AI does is complete the first step of ISA: figuring out each person’s current situation. Some people had already bought it, while others might still be considering it. The first text message was also deliberately written to be easy to decline. The original text reads:
嗨 {名字}，我是 {房仲公司} 的 {房仲名字}。你還在考慮 {地區} 的房子嗎？還是計畫已經改變了？
The voice AI, by contrast, identifies itself as an AI within the first few seconds of every call.
Every conversation is automatically summarized and tagged in the backend dashboard. When someone who is considering buying is identified, they are flagged and handed to the real estate agent to call personally.
Over about 7 months, out of more than 60,000 leads, about 11,000 were disconnected or fake numbers. After also excluding people with no consent record, about 44,000 remained contactable. In the end, 9,100 people responded or answered the phone and talked. Only 480 genuinely wanted to talk right now, which was only about 1% of the people actually contacted. But from just that 1%, there were 34 closed deals.
For this SMS AI and voice AI system, the agency only charged a $5,000 setup fee, plus about $6,000 in SMS and call fees, for a total of about $11,000. That cost is roughly equivalent to hiring one ISA for 2 months. Compared with the “4 full-time ISAs for 6 months” mentioned earlier, it’s a massive saving.
More importantly, the real estate agent earned as much as $490,000 in commissions from these 34 transactions.
Of course, the AI didn’t get through the process without making mistakes. The voice AI once called a woman who had bought a house through this real estate agent just two years earlier and asked if she was still looking for a house. The reason was that she had been listed twice in the CRM. After that, before contacting anyone, it would first cross-check the list against the agent’s past transaction records.
From this collaboration, Warm-Reaction-456 also summarized three points:
First, the AI’s job has to be small enough. He believes a big part of why this will succeed is that the AI’s task was narrowed to “figuring out the other party’s current situation,” with everything afterward left entirely to the real estate agent themselves.
人們在面對一個「只是來問候一下」的對象時，會放鬆很多。
The AI doesn’t pitch, doesn’t talk about price, and doesn’t pretend to be the real estate agent, so the other party is more willing to reply.
Then there was the fact that he charged too little. In the post, he said outright that the $5,000 setup fee “in hindsight was really too cheap.” With a $490,000 commission against about $11,000 in total expenses, for every $1 a real estate agent invested, they generated about $44.5 in commission revenue, while the agency got only a tiny fraction of it.
Finally, he believes that if you have thousands of leads you no longer call, that may be the cheapest source of business, because you already paid for them. Therefore, you must keep these two groups—”already bought a house” and “maybe next year”—because they are your next batch of sellers and your next batch of buyers.
Source: KOCPC Chinese