Normally, today is when I send you the five things worth your attention in The Chris List.

Not today.

For the last three weeks, I've been buried in a dataset, spending countless hours analyzing the results.

457 agents. 30 questions. 11 minutes per response.

They were asked what they're doing to market their businesses, what's generating high-quality leads, and where they're putting their money moving forward.

I expected the data to be interesting.

I didn't expect it to be this interesting.

A few of the things that stood out:

→ 46.5% of agents say they'd lose more than a quarter of their business if marketing stopped for 12 months. 21% said they'd lose half or more. Marketing isn't overhead anymore. For half of this industry, it is the business.

→ Agents who pay for Zillow rate the leads good or excellent at 10× the rate of free users. The "portal leads suck" narrative in real estate is almost entirely a non-customer projection. The data is brutal about this.

→ 13 of the 21 channels we measured deliver zero leads to more than 70% of the agents using them. Not low leads. Zero. In a typical month. The waste in this industry's marketing spend is staggering, and the channels that work are not the ones getting the biggest budgets.

Those are three of the findings. The full report has dozens more.

Brokerage head-to-heads. Email list size inflection points. The ROI of vertical-video story. What top producers do that everyone else doesn't.

We're unveiling all of it, every chart, every cross-tab, every surprise, live this Thursday at 1pm Eastern.

It's a one-hour livestream. It's free.

The full PDF report goes to everyone who attends.

And honestly, even if you can't make it, RSVP anyway because registrants get the recording and the report. Non-registrants don't.

→ RSVP here

If you forward this to one agent who needs to see the data on what's actually working in 2026, you'll be doing them a real favor.

This stuff doesn't usually get measured, and when it does, it doesn't usually get shared.

See you Thursday.

— Chris

P.S. The single most surprising number in the entire report is one I haven't teased in this email. I'll show it to you on the livestream. RSVP and find out.