Most agents who hit rock bottom walk away. Jake McLaughlin cold-called his way back. A college dropout who got into real estate in 2020 with no money, no connections, and no idea what he was doing, McLaughlin spent years grinding through flooring jobs, commuting five hours in a car with a broken window, and walking strangers’ dogs on an app just to stay afloat. He ended one stretch with literally $30.56 to his name. And then he came back and closed nearly $25 million in sales in 2025. But that’s not even the most interesting part of his story. Along the way, he spotted a problem so obvious—and so ignored—that he built a platform to fix it. ReferralMate now serves over 12,000 agents nationwide and has facilitated $293 million in referred real estate. Jake recently sat down with Luke Acree and Josh Stike on Stay Paid to talk about how all of it happened.
How do you build a real estate business from nothing?
Jake didn’t come from a real estate family. He didn’t have a mentor or a training budget. He had YouTube. After watching videos during college classes convinced him every real estate agent was rich, he dropped out, got his license, and started cold-calling strangers out of his MLS tax records. His first deal took seven months and netted him $970 after the brokerage split. While he was building his pipeline, he was also hauling flooring for his dad’s company—ripping up carpet in houses owned by people with many cats. It was, as he put it, exactly the kind of misery that motivates you to get really good on the phone.
His target was 20 calls a day. He usually hit 13. But after a month of consistency, that translates to two or three interested parties, one of whom becomes a listing. “If you’re a realtor and you sell one house a month,” he told Luke and Josh, “you’re living pretty good no matter what market you’re in.”
He got into expired listings, FSBOs, and eventually circle prospecting—and made a counterintuitive discovery. When he started targeting the highest-end communities in his area, the luxury market in the Poconos, he found that wealthy people were the easiest to connect with. They had often built their own success through hustle and cold calls, and they respected someone who showed up the same way. One of those calls from five years ago is now producing a $4 million lakefront listing.
What does rock bottom actually look like—and how do you come back from it?
After a couple of strong years in the Poconos, Jake made a move that nearly ended everything. He relocated to Pittsburgh to launch a lead generation company, leaving behind the market and relationships he’d spent years building. The business burned through his money. He found himself commuting five hours each way to show listings in the Poconos while living in Pittsburgh, in a car that regularly broke down. His driver’s side window broke twice, stuck open during a Pennsylvania winter. He walked dogs on an app called Wag to cover expenses. He left Pittsburgh with $30.56.
He moved back, rebuilt, and ended 2024 with roughly $79,000 to $82,000 in income and somewhere around $7 to $8 million in volume. Starting from zero. In 2025, he closed nearly $25 million. That kind of recovery doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because he was willing to do everything at once—cold calling old clients, filming home tour videos, posting everything to social media—until something caught.
What is ReferralMate, and why did it need to exist?
The problem Jake kept running into was referrals. When he was commuting between Pittsburgh and the Poconos, he had clients in one market and no agent in another. The only option was Facebook—post your referral in a group, watch 100 agents tag each other in the comments, dig through the chaos, message someone, call someone, draft an agreement, get the broker to sign it, and hope the whole thing didn’t fall apart. He called those pile-ons “fan clubs.” He wanted something better.
He looked for a platform. There wasn’t one. So he built a waitlist on a Squarespace page that was literally just an email field. He expected maybe 70 people to sign up. Almost 3,000 agents joined before the platform even launched. He then convinced his wife—who had just been accepted to a doctorate program in psychology—to drop out and teach herself to code it.
Today, ReferralMate functions as what Jake describes as a job board for referrals. An agent posts a referral, other agents apply, and the posting agent selects who they want to work with—essentially interviewing candidates to find the best fit for their client. The platform is free to join; the only fee is the referral percentage agents agree to with each other. Jake’s vision for where it’s headed is bigger: a full referral operating system, complete with referral tracking, in-app messaging, pre-agreement signing, and automated close tracking using public data so agents actually get paid. “The way Zillow replaced newspapers,” he said, “is how ReferralMate is going to operate the referral ecosystem.”
How do you actually make a referral work?
Getting a referral is one thing. Converting it is another. Jake’s advice on selecting who to refer to comes down to one principle: match the agent to the client, not to their production numbers. A top producer is not automatically the right choice. A hungry new agent isn’t either. What you’re looking for is someone who speaks the same language as your client. If your client is ex-military, find an agent who connects with that world. If they’re a first-time buyer from a different cultural background, find someone who can meet them where they are. The referral only works if the person receiving it can actually connect with the client on a human level.
Once the referral is made, speed matters. Jake won’t sit on a warm lead for days. But beyond speed, his preferred method is the warm handoff—a group text where the referring agent introduces the receiving agent directly to the client. Not a cold call with “Hey, your friend sent me.” A real introduction, in the same thread, with the trust already transferred. “It’s Luke giving me a client all in one place,” he said. “There’s no question.” Luke confirmed the same pattern holds at ReminderMedia: the referral-to-close rate jumps dramatically when the warm introduction is done right.
What would Jake tell his younger self?
His answer is two things he ignored for years. First, recruit. Not in an aggressive, build-a-team way, but strategically. Even bringing in two or three agents gives you passive income on slow months—a floor under your business when deals aren’t closing. Jake spent years without that safety net, which meant every slow stretch hit hard. Recruiting covers the bottom end so you can focus on the top.
Second, go all-in on social media. Not general content—localized content. Home tours. Community videos. Posts that make people in your market feel like you’re part of their world. Jake says his best clients have come from social, not cold calls. Cold calling is what kept him alive. Social media is what built the business. He could go back and lean into it from day one.
What should you do this week?
Luke ended the episode with a simple challenge: ask yourself honestly whether you have a real referral network—not just a few agents you occasionally text, but a pillar of your lead generation strategy. Most agents don’t. They rely on cold outreach, paid leads, or their sphere, and treat agent-to-agent referrals as an afterthought. But for agents like Jake, referrals have become a reliable, relationship-driven revenue stream that doesn’t require a monthly ad budget.
If you want to start building that, Jake’s platform is free. You can join at referralmate.co. And if you’re curious about his ongoing content on the agent side, you can follow him on social—he’s putting out the localized, practical stuff he wishes he’d started years ago.
How ReminderMedia helps you stay top of mind with every client you’ve ever served
Jake’s whole business model—from cold-called luxury clients who are still calling him five years later, to a referral platform built on agent-to-agent trust—runs on one thing: people remembering him. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because he has stayed consistently present, valuable, and visible across every relationship he’s built.
That kind of consistent presence is exactly what ReminderMedia was built to support. Through branded magazines, postcards, and automated marketing tools, agents can stay meaningfully connected with their entire database throughout the year—without manually managing every touchpoint. The agents who win referral business are the ones their past clients never forget. Learn more about how ReminderMedia can help you build a referral-based business.
