David Brough runs a 21-agent real estate team in Fort Wayne, Indiana and closed 320 homes in 2025. For years, Zillow was his number two lead source. It worked well enough, but by late 2025 the cost to acquire a closed deal had climbed to the point where it was no longer profitable. "The quality of the leads had gone down quite a bit," David says. "It wasn't making enough income for the business."

He dropped Zillow in October 2025 and started redirecting that budget toward something he'd been underleveraging for years: his own 30,000-person database.

In 2026, David is going all in on relationships over speed. He's shifted his paid budget to Google PPC to catch buyers earlier in the research phase, running first-time homebuyer webinars every two to three weeks, and planning seller workshops every 60 days.

He's also working with us to load personalized buyer and seller drip campaigns into his CRM so every new lead gets nurtured with relevant, problem-solving messages from David himself. "One out of three or four people coming in from paid leads are already in our database," he says. "Why aren't we just focusing on the people we already have?"

David is a Vyral Marketing client and has been for several years. Watch the interview to learn how he's restructuring his marketing plan to sell more homes at a higher profit in 2026.