CHRISTIAN GIVENS: The Lead-Source Audit That Turned Two Deals Into Ten-Plus a Year

Most agents respond to a bad year by adding lead sources. Christian Givens did the opposite, and that decision is the whole story.

In 2021 — while nearly every agent in the country was riding the easiest market in a generation — Givens closed roughly two deals and took about a $20,000 loss. “While everyone is having a great 2021, my 2021 was awful. It was the worst,” he told Mattias and Erica Clymer on The REI Agent. He was back in real estate full time, working solo, living with his parents, and spending savings on a coach.

What that coach did next is the part worth copying. In 2022 and 2023, they stopped guessing and ran the numbers on where his closings actually originated. The answer was not open houses, not portal leads, not a farm. It was social media — the thing he had been doing inconsistently and treating as a side activity. So instead of diversifying into three more lead sources, he cut toward the one that was already working.

Today he does 10 or more deals a year from social media alone, with an audience of more than 68,000 on Instagram built without a dollar of paid advertising.

Run the audit before you buy another lead source

A bad year feels like a volume problem, so agents solve it by adding inputs: a portal subscription, a dialer, a mailer campaign, a new niche. Each costs money and attention, and none gets enough of either to produce a result.

Givens’ coach forced a different question: of the business you did close, where did it come from? That is a backward-looking audit, not a forecast, and it is cheap to run. Pull your last 12 to 24 closings, tag each by true origin — not how the lead was entered in your CRM, but how that person actually came to know you — and look at the concentration.

The industry data suggests a lot of agents would find what Givens found. In NAR’s REALTORS® Technology Survey, social media ranks as the number one source of quality leads, cited first by 39% of agents, ahead of CRM at 23% and the MLS at 17%. Professionally, agents cluster on Facebook (76%), Instagram (57%), LinkedIn (55%), YouTube (31%), and TikTok (16%). The channel is not exotic. What is rare is the willingness to concentrate on it after the audit says to.

His concentration produced a second, quieter result: new construction now makes up roughly a third of his business every year. Consistent public content about homes attracts the buyer shopping openly and early — exactly the profile that ends up in a builder’s sales center.

The wealth came before the following

Before any of the content existed, Givens bought a duplex at 22, near Lynchburg, while working a job that paid about $36,000 a year. The tenant side covered 100% of the mortgage. He calls it “probably the best investment I could have ever purchased at that age,” and the math is hard to argue with: at $36K of income, eliminating housing expense is not a lifestyle upgrade, it is a different financial life.

That is the agent-investor sequence Mattias Clymer argues for on the show — get the W-2, use it to qualify for a duplex or a house you can rent rooms in, then go find an agent so busy they need help. The order matters. The stable income buys the asset; the asset buys the freedom to take a commission-only job.

His second purchase, around age 25, is the more instructive one. He bought in a different part of the same metro after he had already moved away, and he kept the same property manager he had used on the duplex — a manager with no presence in that submarket. The unit sat a full year with no tenant. He sold it, and a tenant materialized almost the moment it hit the market.

The lesson is not “don’t invest out of area.” It is that a vendor’s competence is submarket-specific. A property manager who leases well in one part of a metro may have no tenant pipeline, no signage presence, and no pricing feel three exits away. Underwrite the manager the way you underwrite the deal, and reprice the vacancy assumption when you change submarkets.

Grief clarified the decision, it didn’t make it

Givens’ path detoured hard: a Maryland job that lasted seven months, a license, a couple of years on a team, then three years at a nonprofit. His father got sick during that stretch and died. He stayed about two more years before returning to real estate full time in 2021.

The line he keeps returning to is simple: “I just had bigger vision for my life.”

The useful part is not the grief. It is that the loss forced an explicit accounting of what the next decade was supposed to look like — and the answer required a business he controlled. Most people never run that accounting until something makes them. You can run it on purpose.

Three posts a day for three months, and the videos were bad

Concentration only pays if you can survive the lag. Givens’ bridge across it was a challenge with another agent: three posts a day for three months. He calls it the hardest three months of his career. The account barely grew.

He kept going anyway, and describes the real return honestly: “But I didn’t let my lack of skill or the lack of quality that I wanted stop me from showing up.” The output of the challenge was not followers. It was a rebuilt threshold. “Once a day is nothing,” he says now — he is working back toward twice a day.

The perfectionism point is the one most agents need: “You gotta really push past that perfectionism, you know, for the sake of growth.” And his single most practical piece of production advice costs nothing: clean your lens. “Your video will be like 10 times better, I promise.”

The quality jump came from a person, not a plan. Around his 30th birthday he started shooting solo home tours, and a college friend, William — a videographer — offered to help. “This is it. This is what I was missing.”

The formats that actually run

What Givens produces now is a narrow, repeatable set:

• Luxury home tours in the DMV. He shifted from comedy-forward content to touring higher-priced listings, and his own price point followed. He is candid that he still serves all price points — “I can’t afford a $5 million house. I still want to go see it too.”
• A three-minute scripted series per new listing. His team runs a recurring comedy series he describes as “kind of like The Office, but for real estate,” produced once per new listing. One episode cast his business partner’s grandson as a buyer; another turned a larger listing into a hunt for a team member.
• Comedy roughly once a quarter. It was his origin format and his grief-coping default. He kept it as seasoning rather than a diet.
• Annual client events, aimed at one goal: “trying to just be top of mind at all times.”
• A verbal habit from his coach: end phone calls with a light mention of what he does. “I don’t have to call you and ask you for business. You already know what I do. I’m just gonna subtly remind you what I do.” He calls it a game changer.

Four of those five are systems, not inspirations. One series per listing. One event per year. One line at the end of a call. That is what a concentrated channel looks like once it stops being a hobby.

What he won’t post

Givens’ boundaries are as deliberate as his cadence, and they are a competitive asset rather than a limitation.

He does not mine his family’s hardest moments for reach: “I could have the most viral account on TikTok if I really, really wanted to share everything that we’ve been through.” His filter is blunt — “if it makes me cringe, then I’m not posting it,” and if he’d be embarrassed for his mother to see it, it doesn’t go up. He has nieces and nephews watching, so it stays kid-safe.

He also refuses to critique the homes he tours: “I’m not gonna be a critic of anybody’s house… my job is to protect my client’s best interest.” For an agent whose content is public and permanent, that is risk management — today’s mocked listing is tomorrow’s seller lead.

The underlying claim is the one worth writing down: “You are the person that you portray yourself to be online.” Content that a client meets and finds accurate converts. Content that oversells creates a gap the first appointment exposes.

A hard market is a training ground

Givens is direct that 2026 has been tougher than 2025. “The market is hard, even for top producing agents is hard. This year has been the year of the hard deal.” His read on why that’s tolerable: “it’s the hard deals that really allow you to just kind of show like, this is why I’m getting paid.”

The activity math backs him up. Clymer cites a coach’s tracking showing that the number of activities required per closed sale has roughly doubled — from about 150 to around 300. If your input volume is flat and your output fell by half, nothing is wrong with your skill. Your math is just out of date.

New construction is where that arithmetic is currently most favorable, which makes Givens’ one-third exposure look less like luck and more like positioning. New homes are roughly 10% of transactions nationally, but builders are competing hard for that share: John Burns Research and Consulting estimates industry incentives — rate buydowns, closing-cost credits, design credits — have run about 7% to 8% of sale price through 2026, well above the historical 2% to 3% norm, and NAHB’s August 2026 survey found 35% of builders cutting list prices outright by an average of 6%.

The caution is equally real. Since the NAR settlement changed how buyer-agent compensation is negotiated and disclosed, some builders have trimmed or restructured what they pay cooperating agents. If new construction is going to be a third of your business, your buyer-representation agreement and your registration process at the sales center are not paperwork — they are your paycheck.

Who not how

Asked for a favorite book, Givens names Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and reduces it to a working principle: “there’s always someone that has the answer to the problem that you have.”

That is the through-line. The coach ran the audit. William fixed the video quality. A business partner made him a team instead of a solo operator. Givens’ job was to keep showing up long enough to be worth someone’s help.

The holistic version matters too. “I can’t sacrifice my health for the sake of business,” he says, and his advice is unglamorous: get up earlier so there is room to train, to pray, to eat a real breakfast, to see the people you’re building this for. “You have to show up for yourself first in order to show up for everybody else.”

The takeaway

Don’t add a lead source this quarter. Audit the last 24 closings, find the channel that already produced them, and give that channel a system, a cadence, and 90 days of unreasonable consistency. The results lag the effort — that’s the whole reason the strategy is available to you.

“Don’t focus on perfectionism, focus on consistency.”

Listen to the full conversation with Christian Givens on The REI Agent.

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