Jess Lenouvel’s Listings Lab strikes Keller Williams coaching partnership

(Jess Lenouvel/submitted)

Former Toronto real estate agent-turned-coach Jess Lenouvel is bringing her approach to social media, digital marketing and inbound client generation to Keller Williams.

The partnership between The Listings Lab, founded by Lenouvel about eight years ago, and MAPS Coaching was announced this week at Keller Williams Mega Camp in San Antonio, Texas.

The Listings Lab has developed new Keller Williams-specific programs based on Lenouvel’s training and systems, which are being offered through the franchise’s MAPS Coaching program.

For Lenouvel, the reach is significant. Keller Williams has nearly 150,000 agents in the U.S. alone.

Rather than simply collecting phone numbers and email addresses through conventional lead generation, she said the goal is to use marketing to move someone from being unfamiliar with an agent to becoming a client who approaches them.

“We are very, very focused on taking someone from a stranger to inbound client,” Lenouvel told REM in an interview from San Antonio. “That’s, I think, what Keller Williams was really after.”

A partnership nearly a year in the making

Lenouvel said the relationship with Keller Williams began when Jason Abrams, chief of industry and strategy officer at the company, entered one of The Listings Lab’s own marketing funnels.

“He experienced the marketing that we teach through my own marketing, and then reached out to me to say, ‘Hey, we might be interested in a partnership,’” Lenouvel said.

Keller Williams agents can purchase the new programs through the MAPS Coaching platform. Lenouvel declined to disclose what agents will pay for the training.

Two levels have launched so far, covering social media and digital marketing, as well as paid traffic. Lenouvel said the plan is eventually to offer three or four levels.

A third is expected to add one-on-one coaching with MAPS coaches trained by Lenouvel in her systems. A potential fourth would be comparable to The Listings Lab’s existing seven-figure agent program, with a greater emphasis on scaling, technology, automation and digital marketing.

The programs will be available to Keller Williams agents in both Canada and the U.S.

The deal is structured as a revenue-sharing partnership rather than an acquisition or flat-rate agreement, Lenouvel said. She does not yet know what it could ultimately be worth.

“It will depend on how successful the sales are,” she said. “I think that the sky’s the limit.”

From selling homes to coaching agents

The partnership marks another step in a career shift that began almost a decade ago for Lenouvel.

Originally from Toronto, she spent about 14 years as a real estate agent before completing her final transaction in 2017. She launched The Listings Lab about eight years ago and said just over 5,000 agents have since gone through its training programs.

Lenouvel said she had reached a point where selling real estate no longer felt particularly challenging and she wanted to shift who she was working with.

“I felt like I was kind of serving the wrong people,” she said. “I really wanted to work with agents and not necessarily with buyers and sellers anymore.”

She was also looking for location independence. Lenouvel moved from Toronto to the Bahamas about five-and-a-half years ago and built The Listings Lab as a digital business that could be run from anywhere.

Today, the company has a team of about 15 people handling much of the program delivery and day-to-day operations, allowing Lenouvel to focus on speaking, creating content, training and keeping its programs current.

“I would say a large part of my role in the business now is R&D,” she said.

That means continually watching developments in social media, automation, AI and digital marketing and adjusting the training as needed. The Listings Lab’s programs range from about $250 per month to $30,000 per year, with its client base roughly evenly split between Canada and the U.S.

The tactics change, the psychology doesn’t

While the tools change quickly, Lenouvel’s broader coaching philosophy is that agents shouldn’t build their marketing around any particular platform, algorithm or tactic.

“Everything we teach is based on human psychology,” she said. “So even if the platforms are changing and the tactics are changing, and the algorithms are changing, the things that work to generate clients, it’s the oldest stuff in the world.”

For Lenouvel, that means starting with what moves someone from being a stranger to an agent to ultimately wanting to work with them, then adapting how that relationship is built as technology changes.

The underlying psychology, she said, stays largely the same. What changes is the implementation — how agents consistently get that content in front of people.

That approach is also shaping the kind of social media content she encourages agents to create as AI makes polished content easier to produce at scale.

“What we’re finding is that the less polished and the more really human the content is, the better that it performs,” Lenouvel said, “because people are trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not.”

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