The Networking Secret to Closing Deals | Leigh Brown

Leigh Brown (00:00)
Well, I’ll just say wild and crazy thing here, Scott. You ready? I mean, just prepare yourself. If you want to be successful, you have to work every day. And I still encounter agents who want to know, where are my leads? ⁓ nobody’s calling me. Talked to a lady yesterday and she said, I thought my phone was just going to ring when I got my license.

Scott Bursey (01:53)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Scott Bursey. And today in studio, we’re joined by a person I’ve really been counting the days to chat with. Leigh Brown, who dominates the residential real estate industry. Leigh is a nationally recognized real estate speaker, brokerage owner, and author of The Next Is Now, known for her candid take on leadership, professionalism, and the future of the housing industry. She has served at many levels of leadership within the real estate

industry while continuing to actively sell and operate in the field. challenges leaders to think differently, lead boldly and build businesses that last. Leigh, welcome to the show.

Leigh Brown (02:38)
Thank you so much, Scott. It’s a pleasure to be here today.

Scott Bursey (02:41)
It’s an honor to have you. Please give us the backstory. How did your career begin and what are you focused on today?

Leigh Brown (02:50)
Well, I started in real estate like a lot of people, by last resort, didn’t like the world I was in. Now, I grew up the child of a realtor, so I had emphatically said, not gonna do this, don’t wanna do what my dad did. Left college and I went into Wall Street, hated that, went into corporate sales, that didn’t work either. So I was throwing my hands up and my dad said, just come home and do real estate because you may as well.

Not really knowing what else to do. I came home and 26 years later here I am loving real estate and loving all the different pathways that’s provided for me.

Scott Bursey (03:27)
and having such a huge impact on the market. And speaking of markets, what markets are you operating in?

Leigh Brown (03:35)
I am just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. We are considered greater Charlotte in this region. I’m in Concord and Harrisburg, which is on the north side. And if you wonder if you know where Concord is, we have Eli Lilly here who manufactures the fat shot. And then we also have Charlotte Motor Speedway. So we have some really big impacts on the culture and on pharmaceuticals throughout the country.

Scott Bursey (03:59)
I would say. Leigh, what caught my attention about you was the sheer scale of the community you’ve built and how you’ve managed to turn high level investing into a collaborative team sport. Curious, with everything shifting in real estate, what’s the one thing that shouldn’t change in your view?

Leigh Brown (04:21)
Real estate at its core is always and will always be a relationship business. It’s what I’ve termed missionary style real estate. It’s belly to belly, nose to nose, toes to toes. And that’s the same whether you’re in residential or commercial or land or property management or investing. The core of your decision making has something to do with the core of somebody else’s decision making. And all of the data and all of the tools

won’t solve that problem of getting everybody to the place where they can move forward. And I love that about real estate. And it’s also one of the hardest things about the business is learning how to give and take and read people so that everybody has an outcome that they’re pleased with.

Scott Bursey (05:55)
Absolutely hey I’m with you on that. Leigh walk me through if you were starting your career today in 2026 where would you put your first 5k?

Leigh Brown (06:07)
⁓ I don’t know if I’d get into this if I was brand new in 2026, Scott, woof, because it’s a whole different ball game. And as a woman of a certain number of years, when I got into business, we didn’t have these, we didn’t even have pagers. Pagers were new, we still had the MLS book and we had control over the data. Today, a new person getting into real estate.

Scott Bursey (06:12)
Yeah

Leigh Brown (06:33)
is confronted with the wildest array of data we’ve ever seen. They’re confronted with technology and that $5,000 will be gone in two seconds flat. I would actually go against the grain and if I were investing $5,000 in starting my business right now, I would do all the things that Leigh Brown did back in 2000 because nobody does them. And that’s of course in that mindset called Blue Ocean Strategy, which is

one of the best business books ever. don’t care what field you’re in. You need to read Blue Ocean Strategy because if everybody else is spending $5,000 on social media, online leads, on stuff, if you spent $5,000 on postcards and door knocking and old school visibility taking people to breakfast, you would find that you would have your business cranking faster because that puts you

into close proximity with other humans. And that’s the core of real estate. And I’ll add in one thing there when it comes to technology, when you’re out meeting people in a neighborhood, ring doorbells are the best technology ever because now you’re not ringing the doorbell wondering if they’re just hiding behind the couch because when you ring the doorbell, they see you, their app went off.

and I get really animated and I wave at the doorbell and say, hey, hey, it’s Leigh Brown with One Community Real Estate. I want them to know I’m not a porch pirate, I’m not a creeper, I’m not trying to do anything bad. I’m a realtor and I’m just out saying hello. And Scott, the funniest thing about it is that most people, of course, do not come back over the ring, but I tell them, I’m going to leave my card.

Scott Bursey (08:01)
You

Leigh Brown (08:21)
Call me if you need me and then I scoot away and so I’ll leave it under a flower pot or under the doormat or what have you. But there have been people who will come back across the voice and say, hey, can you hang out for a second? This literally happened. Man said my wife is on her way back. She wants to ask you a quick question. Can you wait a few minutes? Absolutely, I’ll wait a few minutes and so I stood in the walkway and did not stay on the porch. I moved away from the house because you know the world were in.

And she came rolling back up where she had been out on errands and she wanted to ask about some potential upgrades to the house because they were thinking of selling in the future. And I don’t think you can go that quickly through Instagram. And I’m very big online. However, it’s a longer trust cycle than it is when you get to meet somebody and they get to hear your voice and see your eyes. You shorten the trust cycle, which means the sales come faster.

Scott Bursey (09:18)
Leigh, that’s such a tactical breakdown. It’s a great reminder that success isn’t always about a massive budget. It’s about where you focus your energy first. And in today’s noisy market, what is the one hard truth you think agents are ignoring right now?

Leigh Brown (09:39)
Well, I’ll just say wild and crazy thing here, Scott. You ready? I mean, just prepare yourself. If you want to be successful, you have to work every day. And I still encounter agents who want to know, where are my leads? ⁓ nobody’s calling me. Talked to a lady yesterday and she said, I thought my phone was just going to ring when I got my license.

And I said, mm-hmm.

Because the internet would lead you to believe that and all these successful coaches on YouTube will tell you that and your people who sell the licensing classes will tell you that but that is not the reality. You have to have the self-discipline and the self-drive to work every day. Now when I say every day I don’t mean seven days a week, that’s unrealistic. I mean every day like normal people work with just five days a week.

And if you’re in real estate, you’re probably going to work six because we don’t know how to stop.

But the most successful agents have a plan and they work their plan. They are not waiting for the business to find them. And that’s why it doesn’t matter what’s happening in the markets. It doesn’t matter whether we’re at war with Iran or whether gas prices are down. It doesn’t matter if we’re in the Great Recession or the dot com boom. Things change in the greater economy, but underneath that umbrella, somebody is buying and selling. And if you want to be the one working with them,

They have to know that you’re out there available and working.

Scott Bursey (11:43)
Absolutely. And there’s going to be days that you, your fire may not be burning is, is high as it ought to, but the pros get out there and make it happen anyway. Great point. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from a deal that, that went completely sideways.

Leigh Brown (12:02)
That’s a lot of deals because real estate does that.

The biggest thing that I wish I had understood at a younger age and granted it’s hard to look back at my 20 something self selling real estate because that person didn’t have another income stream. I didn’t have other protections. It was me by myself wasn’t married and if I didn’t sell I had nothing. So that leads you to a certain sense of panic and a little bit of scarcity mindset so that you start trying

to hold deals together. And frankly, those are the ones that go sour and then they fray out and they go from being a spark to a wildfire.

When you have income stability from either multiple streams of revenue or from being married or just from being old like me where I’ve got so much business built up over time, then I am not driven to hold a deal together at all. In fact, right now I’m in the middle of a pretty nasty repair situation of unexpected expenses. My buyer, I think, needs to crash this deal because the numbers no longer work.

emotionally attached to the property. The seller of course wants to declare that it’s as is you got to take it. But I’ve got the ability to turn my numbers brain on and take my personal emotion out of it which means I can give good counsel. And so if you look at all the deals that go sideways almost all of them have to do with emotions that take over from logic and from the inability to look at the long term picture for the buyer the seller.

And frankly, I am in the caboose on that train. My outcome is only tied to what happens to the engine and the engine is my buyers and sellers.

Scott Bursey (13:56)
Interesting to know you have that rookie energy. It’s easy to get out there and grind when you’re broke when you’re first starting out but how do you maintain the fire that you have when you establish your level of success?

Leigh Brown (14:13)
because I love this business, I love America, I love the American dream. We are the last country on earth with any semblance of property rights. And when you start looking at how property rights are under attack, I realize I’ve got to fight really hard because so many people are not paying attention.

They’re busy, they’re distracted, or they’re numbed by the devices in their hands, and they don’t see what’s eroding around them. And I see it because I’m working with first time people still. I love my first timers, which I know is kind of crazy because at 26 years, I could choose to work with luxury. I could choose to work with high dollar. I like my normies. And if I’m working with a first time buyer whose family never owned anything, I have got

to have fire because what if?

They never encounter me. What if they encounter somebody who doesn’t have the passion? And then that buyer hits a wall and it happens. The wall could be financing. It could be credit score. It could be repairs. It could be just the family says don’t do it or it could be dad. We all know first time buyers dad gets involved and then things suddenly get wonky. So if they don’t have an agent who encourages and says consider A, B and C consider that if you want to be in my

30 years from now, got to get you on the ladder now. My passion is not for my outcome, it is for theirs. And I have found that in real estate, the people who are the most successful…

have a singular drive and it is to help the person across from them get what they want. And frankly, that’s the story of America. America’s founding father said, let’s get the people what they want. And right now we have some challenges with that. I’ll be darned if I’m going to sit back and let it go down on my watch because I have two kids that are 19 and 21 years old who both, by the way, have purchased their first houses. And I’m going to make sure that they have

opportunities still that I took for granted that my parents took for granted and my kids are eyes wide open. They know how much at risk it is.

Scott Bursey (17:08)
Thank you for sharing that and what a tremendous perspective. Leigh, what’s the one piece of advice you wish you had known when you were first starting out?

Leigh Brown (17:22)
I wish I had known that people can simultaneously be good people but also liars. I was raised by a man who my dad is the most loving person on the planet. He believes in the true good in all people, which means people will do him wrong sometimes and he just lets it slide off his back. I wish I had that ability. I don’t. But because I was raised by him,

I started off in real estate believing all people were telling me the truth, believing all agents were telling me the truth, believing that they wanted to abide by the code of ethics, that they wanted to be good. And then the longer I’m in the business, I can find that even really good people can step off the path because it’s just this one time or they forget to tell you something or my seller said, don’t tell you. And then they start taking little

edges off of their core goodness and I hate seeing that in good people but I also know they’re not bad people that make mistakes and real estate just shows you that and I think the biggest lesson pre-licensing should be telling people is that you are dealing with giant amounts of money what is for most people their largest financial transaction they will ever make.

Now, of course, I’m saying most because you do have your super wealthy, but again, that’s not my client base. My clients, if they’re taking out a note for $400,000 and it’s 30 years long, it’s not just the money, it’s the my kids are going to get off the school bus there.

Can my mom get into the house? She’s got mobility issues. How are we going to manage this? And the emotion gets so big. And we have to remember that we’re dealing with giant dollars that are tied to giant emotions, which is what causes good people to start taking little side steps. But it also means that good people need you because they need to talk through their emotions to get the moving forward happening.

It’s the wildest business ever and it’s interesting to me because in the public persona and in the world of venture capital and AI and websites and big giant corporations, they look at everything from a dollar perspective. They want to commoditize real estate. You cannot commoditize an emotional business.

Scott Bursey (19:54)
a of good, good insight there. And I know our audience is going to find value in those words. Those were great words. Now, Leigh, I know a lot of our audiences either earlier in their journey or looking to level up. And I think they benefit from hearing this from you. When it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Leigh Brown (20:20)
make eye contact with people and I work really really really hard to remember their names. If you think about it we’re in a world where people get buried they’ll be having a conversation with you but they’re staring at their phone you go to a restaurant and there’s four people sitting together staring at their phones. If I’m the one who is actively engaging because eye contact is active engagement people unlock

Scott Bursey (20:27)
Absolutely.

Leigh Brown (20:48)
sooner. They tell you what’s going on sooner and that allows you to serve sooner. And I find this especially with those that are younger than us because obviously we’re those gen Xers, the lost quiet small generation, got all these millennials and the zoomers coming and they’ll tell me I’m creepy because I make too much eye contact and I say it’s not creepy to pay attention to someone you’re just not used to it.

So you gotta think about the way that, again, it’s a blue ocean strategy, right? If nobody else is doing it, do that one thing. And I have had people that will say, but I don’t know how to remember names, I’m terrible with names. Well, that’s a story you tell yourself. If you tell yourself you’re terrible at something, you will be terrible at that something.

However, if you tell yourself a different story and say I choose to be good at remembering names. Well, when I meet you, I’m going to repeat your name a couple of times. in fact, here’s a trick for all of you who have really hard time with names. Ask somebody how to spell their name. As somebody with a name that is frequently misspelled. If I meet a Linda, I will say, now are you an L I or an L Y and people light up Scott because they’re like, finally.

Somebody guts me. Well, the fact that they reacted is a hook in my brain and then me asking and them repeating was another hook. I might not remember it immediately, but the next time I see her, like, I remember you, I remember you. mean, she’s like, Linda, I’m like, dang it, you’re L-Y. And then I

get back to my hook. It’s so powerful. And back to our earlier conversation, it doesn’t cost you anything and you will stand out.

in a really crowded marketplace with things that are basic human needs. We need to be recognized. We need to be heard. We need somebody to listen and not talk on top of us. And when you provide that, you’re more than a real estate professional. You’re their new trusted cohort. You’re their friend. You’re the person that they are glad to see.

Scott Bursey (22:59)
that human connection, it’s so vital. And that’s not just good karma, that’s a bulletproof business strategy. Leigh, last question. What are you most excited about now? What do want people to know about your story, to keep an eye on?

Leigh Brown (23:18)
⁓ that’s a trick question, Scott, because I am most excited about whatever I’m doing right this moment. Yesterday, I was at the new location for my firm. I’m, of course, an independent broker. I was the most excited about getting the logo in the window and getting the printer working because I’m not really a technology girl. So to make the printer work was very exciting. But when I was in there with one of my anchor agents, we had three different people that popped in because they saw that we were there.

and it just lit my fire up again for not me but for this anchor agent who’s chosen to affiliate with me. I can watch her success grow. That’s what I get on fire for. I’m on fire for the Lord when I’m doing my Sunday devotional series and somebody asks the question or we have a conversation that lights me up. When I’m working on a stage, I was at the National Land Conference last week and

I was able to share some of the work I’ve done in disaster relief in North Carolina and had some people come up afterward that were asking how they could get involved to go help more people. That’s my whole goal and all the things that I’m doing. How can I be useful? How can I help somebody else go to their next level, get what they want? And I think if I get bored, I’ll just have to go find something else to do because I can’t just sit around and let this

one precious life passed me by.

Scott Bursey (24:49)
That’s incredible. Thanks for those insights. That level of conviction is exactly what it takes to actually win in this market and win in society. All right, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out, connect with you, maybe collaborate or learn more about what you’re doing. What’s the best way for them to reach you?

Leigh Brown (25:09)
You can of course find me on any of the social networks, but I’m Leigh Thomas Brown because you know, gotta have my maiden name involved and keep that side of the family alive. And my main website is leighbrown.com. That’s L-E-I-G-H brown.com and you can explore all of the different angles of my business life. And if you contact you will get a contact back.

Scott Bursey (25:31)
Huge thanks to Leigh for dropping those strategies. It was awesome having you on the show. Thank you for being here.