The Homeowner Data Movers Are Sleeping On: Hunter Munroe on Getting to Sellers First

The Snoball Effect Podcast exists to hand home service company owners concrete things they can use right now to grow. This episode is built for movers.

Todd Jensen sits down with Hunter Munroe, VP of Sales at USA Home Listings and its newly launched My Home Story, a homeowner-data and lead-generation company built for movers and home service operators. Hunter has lived on both sides of the phone. He ran the trucks and the calendar as a general manager, and now he builds the data movers use to find their next customer. The conversation covers scoring homeowners on their likelihood to move before they ever start searching, the signal most movers underestimate, and what a healthy outbound motion looks like for a growing company.

Key Takeaways

• Get to sellers first — A house that hits the market usually will not move for two months, so the winners plant seeds long before the homeowner raises a hand.
• Speed to lead is the underrated signal — Waiting even five minutes to respond can drop your close rate by 4 to 5 percent in that gap alone.
• Seven to eight touches, not one — It takes about seven to eight touches before a homeowner asks for a quote, so a single postcard is a wasted trigger.
• Score homeowners with your own results — My Home Story learns from your bookings, so the lead score sharpens the more you use it.
• Start outbound, stop over-relying on AI — Let smart tools fuel your leads, but keep the booking and the relationship human.

From Chick-fil-A to General Manager: How Hunter Learned the Business

Hunter did not plan a career in moving. He graduated with a history education degree he never used, spent about a year as a hospitality manager at Chick-fil-A, and picked up part-time shifts on a moving truck in Atlanta to pay down credit card debt. A former college offensive lineman, he figured he could handle the labor and lean on the hospitality instincts for the customer side.

The turning point came in the fall of 2019. The owner of Top Dawg Moving was leaving for a two-week destination wedding with no cell service, and he had been booking all the jobs, dispatching the trucks, and handling every call himself. Five movers were invited to a training session to learn the office. Hunter was the only one who showed up. After a single eight-hour drill session, he ran the whole business for two weeks and set a two-week revenue record while the owner was off the grid. That accidental audition turned into a full-time general manager role just as the pandemic hit in early 2020. By the time he left in the fall of 2022, the company had grown to about 10 trucks doing roughly 2 million dollars in revenue, strictly local across North Metro Atlanta.

What USA Home Listings and My Home Story Actually Do

USA Home Listings started about eight years ago as a homeowner-data and direct-mail business. Today it works with about 500 movers and has roughly 740 subscribers in total. “We are a direct mail and home seller data platform,” Hunter explained. “Two things that we’ve excelled at is targeting houses that are newly on the market or newly under contract, by sending them a postcard that’s got your brand, your phone number, your email, your information on it.” Movers also get the homeowner and realtor contact info, and they can work that list however they want.

My Home Story is the new version the team launched this month. It keeps what worked and goes deeper. Where movers were used to on-market data, they now also get off-market data, houses that are not currently listed, along with the full history of the home. Filters cover pending and under-contract homes, newly listed homes within the last 14 days, coming-soon tags, price, square footage, and year built, plus a do-not-call filter that screens out numbers a mover legally cannot dial.

Scoring Homeowners Before They Ever Start Searching

The feature Hunter is most excited about is the lead score. It is not a static number bought off a list. It learns from each mover’s own performance.

As a mover pulls listings and books jobs, the system captures what converts and surfaces patterns like which price points book best or whether homes that just went under contract respond better. The off-market detail runs deep too: beds and baths, lot size, how much equity the homeowner holds, the listing agent, and when the home last sold. As Hunter framed it, that lets an owner decide who their ideal customer is and who it is not, all before picking up the phone. It is the same instinct behind reaching sellers before they search.

The Signal Movers Underestimate: Speed to Lead

When Todd asked which data point movers consistently underestimate, Hunter did not hesitate: speed to lead, the same thing he learned first as a GM.

“If that reach out isn’t instantaneous, and even if you wait five minutes from when you get the notification in your CRM, your close rate, even if it takes you five minutes to get back to them, drops by 4 or 5 percent just in that gap alone,” Hunter said. Todd’s analogy: a lead is like McDonald’s fries, delicious for about 10 minutes and then cardboard.

The hard part is execution when an owner is juggling a hundred things. His honest diagnosis of why speed to lead slips is that owners try to be the hero of every part of the business.

His fix is delegation. “Growth can be had when we let go and we trust others to help our business grow, and we let them make mistakes, and we coach ’em anyways,” Hunter said. He is blunt that this is exactly what he got wrong: he burned out and did not want to do moving anymore because he never built a good team around himself. If sales run only through the owner at a company past a million dollars, speed to lead will always be the first thing to break.

What a Healthy Outbound Motion Looks Like

Most growing movers live on inbound. Hunter walked through the outbound rhythm he would run instead. A house hits the market, a trigger fires, and a postcard goes out with the brand on it. Then he layers a soft email, not a hard sell: “Hey, I’m Hunter with Hunter Moving and Storage. Congrats on the new listing. Down the road, if you need a quote, let me know.” When a house goes on the market, it is probably not moving for another two months, so this is the plant-the-seed stage. From there the touches stack: another email a week later, another postcard around two weeks in, then calls every three or four business days until the move. Larger homes can be called earlier because they tend to plan further ahead.

“On average, it probably takes about seven to eight touches for someone to finally raise their hand and say, ‘Yes, I’m interested in a quote,’” Hunter said. A single postcard uses up one of those touches and stops. This is why an eight-touch follow-up cadence beats a one-and-done send.

Hunter is not precious about which channel gets the credit. He raised the attribution problem himself: a homeowner gets the postcard, then the email, then checks your Google profile, and the system logs a Google lead even though the outbound work created the demand. His answer is to stop worrying about single-channel credit and go omnipresent. “You have to be tapping into any and all channels you have to get in front of your customer because your competition is,” he said. That reality is exactly why clean lead attribution matters, and it is the heart of what a healthy outbound motion requires.

Start and Stop for 2026

Todd closed by asking what movers should start and stop in the second half of 2026. Hunter’s start was clear: start as much outbound cold activity as you can, because your competition already is. And it is more than cold calls and emails. Get involved in your community, join networking groups, sponsor events, and go shake realtors’ and apartment managers’ hands so people know you as a person, not just a business.

His stop was the one he called controversial: stop over-relying on AI. Hunter uses it every day and respects it, but he does not believe the common consumer is ready to hand a robot their information to book a move. “Let AI fuel your leads. Don’t let it fuel your booking and your actual sales process. That still needs to be human. That still needs to be actual relational,” he said. A move is not a DoorDash order. It is personal, so it has to stay human.

That is the same conviction behind everything Snoball does. Technology creates scale, but real people create trust. To turn this homeowner data into recurring demand, the natural next step is to build a realtor referral engine on top of it.

Connect with Hunter

You can find Hunter Munroe on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and My Home Story on any social platform. To see the homeowner data and the new lead score for yourself, visit USA Home Listings, where the My Home Story platform is now live.