In the competitive world of real estate, the traditional advice to agents is to dedicate hours to cold calling to build a pipeline. However, Justin Nimergood, founder of the Top Gun Team at Epique Realty in Southlake, TX, challenges this notion. He argues that cold calling is one of the most persistent inefficiencies in agent teams, pulling licensed agents away from tasks that actually generate revenue.
Nimergood's framework centers on what he calls commission-generating activities (CGAs) – tasks that directly produce closed deals, such as showings, negotiations, and client consultations. Cold outreach, he contends, does not belong on this list. “When a lead is cold, they need to be warmed up again before we’re going to be able to have any real effect on them,” he explains. Spending one to two hours dialing contacts who mostly don’t answer yields no revenue and compounds into missed opportunities elsewhere.
To address this, the Top Gun Team has partnered with Angel AI, a company providing an AI-supported call center staffed by human callers based in Dallas–Fort Worth. The process begins with the team submitting a call list and script. The AI then scours publicly available data to rank contacts by priority, ensuring the most promising prospects are called first. After calls, the AI analyzes recorded conversations for buying signals and generates a report identifying genuinely interested contacts. For every 100 people called, perhaps 10 answer, and of those, five are flagged as priority leads.
The reporting layer is what Nimergood considers most operationally valuable. Instead of agents sifting through raw call logs, the system surfaces the filtered list automatically, allowing agents to focus personal outreach on engaged contacts. Moreover, the system removes dead leads entirely. When AI analysis indicates a prospect is no longer in the market, that contact is archived, preventing wasted effort on unproductive initiatives. “The point is, we don’t waste our time with initiatives that are not productive,” Nimergood says.
Nimergood is deliberate about the domestic, human-caller model. While fully automated AI voice calling exists, he believes it isn’t ready for scale. “It hasn’t been ironed out or perfected yet,” he notes. He also emphasizes the perception issue with international call centers. “People stereotype. They just do, and so the more we can minimize that, the better.”
This approach illustrates how agent teams are beginning to treat outreach infrastructure as a distinct operational layer, separate from the high-value work agents do once a lead is warm. For teams scaling quickly, the ability to triage large numbers of contacts without burdening agents determines whether more leads translate into more closed deals or just more unanswered calls. Nimergood's philosophy is clear: “If they want to be top-producing agents, they have to minimize their administrative time, and they have to maximize their CGA time.”
By outsourcing cold calling to a domestic, AI-prioritized team, the Top Gun Team ensures that agents spend their time on activities that move deals forward, setting a new standard for what team support means in real estate.
