In the competitive Dallas–Fort Worth real estate market, agent teams are constantly seeking ways to maximize productivity. Justin Nimergood, founder of the Top Gun Team at Epique Realty in Southlake, TX, has identified a persistent inefficiency: cold calling. While many coaches advocate for consistent phone outreach, Nimergood argues that the time spent dialing uninterested contacts pulls agents away from revenue-generating activities. He calls these high-value tasks “commission-generating activities” (CGAs), such as showings, negotiations, and client consultations. Cold outreach, he says, does not qualify.
“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,” Nimergood explains. Rapid-fire dialing through 100 contacts can take one to two hours—time that could be better spent on deals already in motion. For a scaling team, every hour lost to cold outreach compounds into missed opportunities elsewhere.
To address this, 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 when Nimergood’s team submits a call list and a script. Before calls are placed, the AI scans publicly available data—including production records and online activity—to prioritize contacts. The most promising prospects are called first and most frequently. After each call, the AI analyzes recordings for buying signals and generates a report identifying which contacts showed genuine interest.
Nimergood describes the outcome: out of 100 people called, about 10 answer, and of those, the system flags five as priority leads based on conversational cues. Agents receive this filtered list rather than sifting through raw call logs. The reporting layer is the most operationally valuable part, he says, because it automates the judgment calls about which cold contacts to prioritize, allowing agents to focus personal outreach on those already engaged.
The system also removes dead leads entirely. If AI analysis indicates a prospect is no longer in the market, that contact is archived rather than recycled. “It lets us know if they’re no longer in the market for a home or whatnot,” Nimergood says. “Then we take them out of our funnel, or we archive them. The point is, we don’t waste our time with initiatives that are not productive.” This prevents stale leads from consuming resources and improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the pipeline.
Nimergood is adamant about one aspect: the callers are human and based in Texas. While fully automated AI voice calling exists, he believes it’s not ready for scale. “I think that will have a place, and that does have a place in our industry, but not quite yet,” he says. He also notes that international call centers can trigger stereotypes, so domestic staffing minimizes that risk. The hybrid model—human callers with AI prioritization—strikes a balance between full automation and in-house calling, addressing both reputational and opportunity costs.
This approach reflects a broader trend in real estate: treating outreach infrastructure as a separate operational layer from the work agents do once a lead is warm. Nimergood applies the same principle across his team’s operations. “If they want to be top-producing agents, they have to minimize their administrative time, and they have to maximize their CGA time,” he says. For teams managing growing lead volumes, the ability to process and triage contacts without burdening agents determines whether more leads translate into more closed deals—or just more unanswered calls piling up.
