How Vermont Agents Reach Relocation Buyers Before Zillow

A software engineer takes a job at the chip plant in Essex Junction. She's still in Boston. On a Tuesday lunch break she opens Zillow, saves six houses in Chittenden County, and fills out three contact forms. She has no cousin in Williston to call. She's never met a Vermont agent. Whoever answers first becomes her agent.

That buyer is the best lead you'll get all year. And most agents never see her coming.

Why are relocation buyers the best leads you're not catching?

Because they're motivated, funded, and on a clock. Someone moving for a job has a start date. They're often pre-approved before they've even picked a town. They buy faster than a local who's been "kind of looking" for two years.

Relocation buyers drive a big share of Vermont deals. People take jobs at the medical center, the university, the chip plant, or they're remote workers who just want out of a city. They all start the same way. Online, from somewhere else, months before they land.

The catch is you can't network your way to them. They're not at the Friday football game or the church supper. They're at a desk in another state, typing "Chittenden County homes" into a search bar.

Where do relocation buyers start their search?

Zillow. Almost always Zillow. And that's the problem.

When an out-of-state buyer starts on Zillow, Zillow sells that lead to whichever agent paid for the zip code. You're not competing on who knows Vermont best. You're competing on who bought the spot. We got into why that's a bad trade in renting your leads instead of owning them.

The fix isn't to spend more on Zillow. It's to be findable before the buyer ever fills out a Zillow form.

What signals that someone's about to move to Vermont?

A few things show up before the buyer does:

• A new job posting at a big Vermont employer, filled by someone from out of state
• Searches like "moving to Vermont," "best towns near Burlington," "Chittenden County schools"
• People asking an AI assistant which agent to call in a town they've never lived in

That last one is newer, and it matters. More relocation buyers now ask ChatGPT or Google's AI "who's a good real estate agent near Essex Junction" before they fill out a single form. If your brand isn't something those assistants can recommend, you're invisible at the exact moment the buyer is deciding. Here's how to build a brand AI assistants actually recommend.

How do you reach them first?

You build a way to get found and to respond that doesn't depend on you refreshing Zillow at a red light.

Three pieces do most of the work:

1. A brand that shows up in search and in AI answers. So the buyer finds you, not just the agent who paid for the zip code.
2. An instant first response. An MIT study of more than 15,000 leads found you're 21 times more likely to qualify a lead when you answer inside five minutes. And 78% of buyers work with the first agent who replies. Not the best one. The first one.
3. A follow-up sequence that runs on its own. Relocation buyers are messaging three agents at once. The one who keeps showing up, without nagging, wins. That's our follow-up automation, and we covered why speed to lead decides these deals.

None of that needs a new CRM. We connect the tools you already pay for so the first reply and the sequence actually fire. That's the whole idea behind owning your pipeline instead of renting it.

What does this look like for a solo agent?

Doable. That's the honest answer. A solo agent gets the most out of it, because there's no assistant catching what you drop.

At roughly $11,000 per Vermont commission, one relocation buyer you catch instead of losing to a slow Zillow reply covers the whole setup several times over. That's projected math, not a promise. But it's your math to run.

We build it project-based, starting at $1,000. You own what we build. No contracts, no monthly fee from us.