You have to solve the lead problem first.

Allow me to tell you a fishing story. A real estate fairy tale, if you will. Once upon a time there was a huge river, stocked full of home-buyer and home-seller fish. All along the banks of that river were REALTORS® with their fishing poles. Everyone was catching all he wanted, and life was good.

Then one day, way upstream, a big commercial fishing company set up operations, with its computerized fish finders, its power nets, and the latest in fishing technology. The company began to pull many of the home-buyer and home-seller fish out of the water before they could make it downstream to the unsuspecting agents.

And it wasn’t long before the fishing downstream began to get tough — so tough, in fact, that many REALTORS® just threw in the towel and quit the business. Others worked longer hours and did what they could to survive, while a third group simply gave up on the whole thing and bought fish from the big commercial fishing operations.

But what if an agent were able to get the same technology that the large commercial fishing operations were using? What if he were to go way, way upstream and begin to catch large quantities of home-buyer and home-seller fish? Not only would life be good again: it would be GREAT! What a huge advantage that agent would have!

Well, believe it or not, this story is actually true. The big commercial fishing operations are the lead vendors, such as HouseValues, HomeGain, and ServiceMagic, and every day the “fishing” gets tougher downstream because new lead vendors open their doors.

If you don’t believe me, just check your email inbox. Not a day goes by that I don’t receive some new version of the same old thing — somebody using my listings to advertise on the Internet, catch my customers, and then attempt to sell them back to me.

And if the lead vendors weren’t bad enough, add to that many of the national companies who do the same thing — catch those home-buyer and home-seller fish upstream, and then sell them to their own agents, for a referral fee. I thought they were supposed to be looking out for their agents, and not exploiting their lack of marketing skill. Hmmm.

But there’s another part of the story that’s also true. It’s possible for an agent to use the same kind of technology that the lead vendors and national companies use to capture their leads — commercial lead capture technology on a single-agent level. It’s called an LCM Gateway, and for those agents who use it, the technology produces amazing results.

Some real-life examples of “lead capture” technology:

In Greensboro, North Carolina, we have an agent named Kay Hunkins. She’s a veteran agent who was one of the first in her market to begin to try to tap the Internet. Well, she was getting literally thousands of hits to her websites every month and had her sites listed in lots of online relocation directories. The result was that she was getting between 10 and 15 leads from the Internet every month. Not bad.

When she installed a lead capture gateway on one of her existing websites, however — she did nothing else differently — she was immediately so busy that she actually found herself ignoring most of her prospects and following up only on the choicest leads.

She began taking listings left and right, and she put a deal in escrow the same week she started with us. Without upping her advertising a dime, she began to capture over 20 leads every day. All of her leads were people who had been coming to use her site anyway, but now she was able to identify them!

Or there’s John Miller, an agent in Austin, Texas. When he began using lead capture technology on his website, John was struggling with only a handful of leads every month. After installing lead capture gateway technology, he captured between 300 and 400 leads every month. His business will never be the same! Now he’s so busy that he’s having to recruit agents and build his own real estate team!

So did these agents suddenly get smarter? Did they begin working harder? Did they work longer hours? Did they just get lucky? No. No. No. No. They just got better fishing equipment. And that “fishing equipment” is our LCM Gateway. Now, instead of having to be dependent on “commercial fishing operations” to sell them leads, they make more leads than they can possibly use, and all for next to nothing.

And I could go on and on with story after amazing story. There are many talented agents out there, just waiting for the tools to succeed and someone to point them in the right direction. They are the reason for their own success — we just happened to be fortunate enough to help them assemble the right tools and then point them in the right direction.

The simple fact is that you have to solve the lead problem before you can attack the other challenges in this business. Having more business than you can handle allows you to work without pressure. It allows you to turn away those “problem” customers. It gives you the ability to multiply yourself by building a team, if you so choose.

And most importantly, it gives you freedom. No longer are you at the mercy of lead vendors, relocation companies, or even your broker. You have the freedom, finally, to take some time off and enjoy life again. A good lead count will solve virtually every other problem you can have.

Matt Jones is the founder and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com and nationally syndicated author of LCM: The Secret to Success in the New Age of Real Estate, The Ultimate Listing Presentation, Traffic: How to Sell Fast and Net More, Becoming a Mega-Producer, and 20 Questions: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Real Estate but Were Afraid to Ask. Jones’ North Carolina-based company has been profiled by major media outlets as an innovator and a pioneer in the industry, and CNN’s Pulse on America claimed FavoriteAgent.com is “changing the way real estate is being done in America.” This content is cross-posted in the following locations: BlogMattBlog.com, RealBlogging.com, NewsGeni.us, TheCommissionCheck.com, and now Amazon Kindle.