IDEAS

Inappropriate Touching

I owe real estate an apology.

Years ago, I sat in the mastermind rooms that helped build the 33 Touches model — the idea that agents should reach their sphere thirty-three times a year to stay top of mind. So if this industry has spent two decades fixated on touching people, I bear some responsibility for that.

In our defense, it made sense at the time. Consistency mattered. It still does. What nobody accounted for was where the economics were headed. And apparently the answer to “not enough touches” wasn’t “seventy-three touches.” At some point, we crossed a line. We started inappropriately touching people.

Here’s what actually changed. When we built the 33-touch model, communication had friction. Writing a note took time. A mailer cost money. Every touch required a sliver of real effort, and that effort was part of the signal — it told the person on the other end that somebody bothered.

Now AI writes the note. Automation drops in a first name and a market stat and calls it personal. The CRM sends it at six in the morning while you’re asleep. The cost of one more generic touch is dropping toward zero. And as the cost of producing a touch approaches zero, so does what it means to receive one.

We built a solution for scarcity. Then abundance showed up and we kept using the same solution anyway. If touches aren’t the valuable thing anymore, I think it’s worth asking what is.

Try this with me. I’ll offer you my database — two hundred and forty people I’ve built relationships with over thirty years in real estate. Free. Market yourself into debt trying to reach every one of them, and most still won’t call you when they actually need help. Meanwhile, the people you call “your clients” are probably sitting in four or five other agents’ databases too. The contact information was never the asset. It’s a name and a number. The relationship built around it is the asset, and it’s the one thing automation can’t manufacture no matter how many times it tries.

Databases store information. Portfolios require stewardship. That’s the shift I think this industry needs to make.

Stewardship asks something different of you. Everyone in your sphere is somewhere between seven days and seven years from needing you for something. Most of the time, neither of you knows exactly where. So consistency still matters — that part of 33 Touches was right all along. But consistency isn’t the same as equal attention, because attention is finite in a way automated messages never are.

I think about my Aunt Jenny at a family gathering. Twenty-five people in one room, and somehow she notices everything. Who’s standing alone by the drinks table. Who got bad news this week and is hiding it well. Who’s dying to tell someone about the new job and hasn’t found an opening yet. She isn’t giving all twenty-five people the same amount of her. She’s reading the room and deciding, moment to moment, where she can actually make a difference.

That’s portfolio stewardship. It was always going to come down to a person deciding where their attention belongs.

Attention was always this limited. What changed is how many people are asking for it. Texts, emails, posts, DMs, notifications, and thousands of automated touches, all lined up for the same finite resource. The loudest request in that line usually isn’t the most important one. The person messaging you the most often usually isn’t the one who actually needs you right now. Aunt Jenny can read a room of twenty-five. Try reading two hundred and forty relationships, alone, with a phone that never stops buzzing.

This is where I think the technology should actually go to work: helping a person notice. Remembering what mattered the last time you talked. Holding the thread so a client doesn’t have to reintroduce their own life every time you check in. Flagging who’s overdue for a real conversation, based on how the relationship has actually been moving. Then handing it back to the human, right at the moment a human is what’s needed.

I built SphereSync around that one question: how does a single person steward hundreds of relationships well, without turning every one of them into a mail-merge? I don’t think the answer to 33 Touches was ever more touches. I think it might be touching less and noticing more.

Your database was never valuable because it held two hundred and forty names. It’s valuable because of what actually exists between you and those two hundred and forty people. That’s the part worth protecting.